PastPresence — studio

PAST PRESENCE

Face-to-face conversations with conjured presences: historical personalities, living legends, fictional figures, voices from the past... and beyond.

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A visitor laughing with a holographic presence in a lit vitrine.

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Studio index

The lines of work.

The audiences differ: heritage sites, classrooms, museums, readers at home. The construct persists, from a phone to a holographic display or a monolith in regional stone.

HEARSAY

Real-time interactive fictions

Interactive fiction through conversation. Participants become the main characters and steer the story by what they say. The Knock is a mystery that develops in real time and becomes a book. Other HEARSAY experiences take on folklore, faith, superstition, and the mind.

See the HEARSAY slate

Echoes

Site-specific conversational heritage installations

Representations of historical figures and regional archetypes in live, face-to-face conversation: holographic figures housed in monoliths fabricated with regional material such as stone or brick. Rosters mix documented people, invented composites, and figures of local lore. Echoes of Indiana is the first commissioned work.

Kindred Spirits

Conversational presences for institutions

Where Echoes works from a place and cycles through many voices, Kindred Spirits is a single presence. One author, artist, public figure, or cultural icon, researched and prepared for conversation at the museum, house, or library devoted to them. Visitors ask questions or make observations and receive replies, one to one, in real time. Every answer is grounded in the writings and the record.

Reading Companions

Author-grounded conversational study tools

Most annotation comes from a stranger: footnotes, external scholarship, a search result of uncertain provenance. Reading Companions replaces that with the author. A browser-based companion sees the page the reader sees and talks it over in the voice that made it, the horse's mouth in place of stray hypertext and a stranger's annotations. Reading becomes a conversation. Built for schools, libraries, and estates.

Tall Tales

Playful conversational characters

The same engine, off the clock. Tall Tales is the studio's lighter line: legends, cryptids, and folk characters that hold up a conversation, charming on the surface and carrying regional knowledge, nature, and safety underneath, with guardrails so it is safe to hand to anyone. SquatchChat is the first, a friendly Sasquatch reached through a dusk trail-cam on Channel 09, snacks encouraged.

The Oracle

A virtual fortune cabinet

A coin-fitted cabinet with one apparition inside. Drawn from ouija boards, old oracles, and Surrealist play, it brings the visitor face to face with a presence summoned by a coin. For amusement only.

Great Panes

Episodic interactive fiction

A distant apartment building seen through framed windows. Returning to a window reveals the small changes in a household whose life has continued out of view.

Tenant

Mixed-reality domestic fiction

A domestic fiction in which an apartment becomes the stage for people returning through robot bodies, or a shared room arriving around the furniture already in front of them.