PastPresence
The Work
Four public forms share one practice: conversation with invented and historical characters, authored rather than improvised. Two stand in physical space, as public art and exhibition, apparitions met face to face. Two run in the browser, built for readers, students, and audiences at home.
01
HEARSAY
Real-time conversational fiction
Fiction that puts the visitor at the center of the story. Each experience is a sustained conversation with invented characters: the visitor plays a part, presses for answers, and decides what to believe. The Knock runs as a mystery that writes itself into a book. The Dose is an exploration of the mind, of faith, prophets, and superstition. The Doppelganger arranges a meeting with unlived lives: the visitor talks with their own alter egos, the selves that took the other road.
Each piece meets its visitor through a different surface: a peephole, a rearview mirror, a degraded feed. Sessions leave a written chapter, and no two visitors receive the same book. The writing engine and character system are shared across the slate, and more experiences are in the wings. The Knock is live; access is arranged on request. What you hear depends on who you ask.
The slate
The Knock
Mystery · History · Hearsay
The Dose
Gods · Prophets · Visionaries
The Doppelganger
The selves you didn't become
The Trail
Cryptid folklore · Found footage
The Fare
Noir · Night shift · No destination
The Chair
Oral history as intimacy
The Booth
Confession without absolution
02
Echoes
Site-specific conversational heritage installations
Public art that lets a place speak with its own voices. A three-dimensional apparition arrives in a body of the region's stone, and the visitor talks with it face to face: figures drawn from the local archive, workers, builders, founders, legends. The roster, the voices, and the stone come from the place itself.
Echoes of Indiana is the first commissioned work.
Status
Echoes of Indiana
Bloomington, Indiana
Echoes of French Lick / West Baden
Springs Valley, Indiana
Echoes of Indiana: fabrication complete, installation underway. The concept entry is a proposal; no partner is committed.
03
Kindred Spirits
Single-figure presences for institutions
One figure, met where their life is kept. A visitor at an author house or museum speaks with a researched presence of that figure, grounded in the figure's own writings and record, and hears the work talked about in the voice that made it.
Echoes works from a place and its many voices. Kindred Spirits works from one figure, at that figure's own institution. Built for author houses, museums, libraries, and estates.
Discuss an institutionDesigned for
Kiosk, gallery, and framed display contexts
One figure, one institution, one defended body of material
Local review before any presence goes public
04
Reading Companions
Author-grounded conversational study tools
Reading with the author in the room. The companion sees the page the reader sees and talks it over: questions answered from the author's own record, the horse's mouth in place of stray hypertext and a stranger's annotations. The aim is to vitalize the reading and send the student deeper into the book instead of away from it.
The current reader is browser-based and split-screen: text on one side, companion on the other, with goal-based tone, repeat visits for web readers, and a memory-off kiosk mode for institutions. The first audiences are schools, libraries, and literary estates.
How a companion session works