Some people deliberately mislead; some do it unintentionally

So how can you know what really happened, or what is just a really good imitation?

Working with this topic

• How can we address the problems of the future without framing it as solely dystopian?
• What kind of (counter-) cultures will the ethnologists be able to trace in a hundred years?
• What would people in the future think of our current distrust in Big Tech?
• How can we achieve subtle positive world-building through curating artifacts for future ethnological museum?

Creating a Curated Exhibition

• through the perspective of a society in 100 years
• highlighting a fictional Counter Movement
• Different objects telling the stories of different people

Different objects tell the story of different People, being part of this movement.

Those objects could be…

• Mesh network
• Antenna
• SD (recovery)
• Cyberdeck
• Small props e.g. stickers

Aesthetics

• Built, modified, and used by those people
• Not clean, not mass-produced, not cyberpunk
• DIY, indie tech
• Different looks –> coming from different people & times
• Still alive electronic devices, or intentionally destroyed

Example:

Object + Character = Story

• Characters are an important part of any worldbuilding process.

• Example of character + object for our future project presentation

Portable Music Player (“Cassette”)
Vienna, Austria, c. 2026
3D-printed housing, acrylic paint, salvaged lithium-ion battery, microcontroller board, microSD card, Arduino components

By the mid-2020s, most music was streamed through smartphone subscriptions and filtered by recommendation algorithms. Some young people pushed back by building their own offline players by hand, modelled on the mass-produced portables of earlier decades.

This one belonged to a Viennese teenager, who painted its shell to look like a cassette, a format they had likely never used. Its play button is worn smooth. The memory card holds 1,214 hand-sorted tracks, ranging from 1970s American rock music and Soviet post-punk to hyperpop and untitled voice memos.

What changes when music is owned rather than rented? How was piracy viewed in DIY electronic communities?

Harddrive experiment

Experiment is not finished
–> use findings for character development

World building

• Creating Characters