The Archaeology of Time Travel - project description

Today we see a lot of new ways in which people approach the past. The desire to travel to another age is not entirely new in the history of the modern world. People have long been interested in how their predecessors lived their everyday lives. By the same token, to bring the past alive has been an ambition of museums for a long time. But within the Experience Society, in the context of a growing tourist industry and fast developing Virtual Reality applications, time travelling has become ever more suggestive and gained even larger audiences, thus acquiring a new significance.

Sensual experiences and restaged might-have-beens are increasingly pushing intellectual reasoning and careful source criticism into the sidelines. A familiar question thus needs to be asked again today: Which role does the past play in our age? In addition, we need to focus on trying to understand the specific phenomena of time travelling that we can observe in contemporary culture. For what reasons and in what way are people choosing to travel into the past today? How do various media and new technologies enable ever more credible time-travels? Which role is played by feelings and emotions during time-travel experiences? Which ethical questions need to be addressed in this context? And: how is all this played out in relation to the future?

These are questions that our interdisciplinary project group wants to investigate in more detail. The group brings together researchers from a number of different disciplines: archaeology, history, social anthropology, sociology, art history, musicology, philosophy and technology. Part of the group are also some institutions which develop and practice time-travelling in their daily operations: The Museum of Foteviken, Kulturen in Lund, Lund University Historical Museum, Lofotr Viking Museum in northern Norway and Land of Legends in Lejre, Danmark. We are interested in what happens when the materiality of museum exhibits and physical reconstructions of past realities meet virtual technology that brings these locations new to live. The project group and network consists of established scholars, technicians and cultural practitioners who all have been working with novel perspectives in relation to time travelling and/or new technologies and art.

In interdisciplinary co-operation, the project investigates the contemporary context in which time travelling occurs, how time-travel experiences are being created and how they are to be evaluated, both in terms of the specific sensual experience they provide and in broader intellectual terms. In particular we will focus on four themes

• Time-travelling between materiality and virtuality
• Time-travelling on the market of experiences
• Designing time-travels
• Evaluating time-travels

Time travelling between materiality and virtuality examines how time travelling makes use both of material and virtual cultures, how these two worlds meet, and which new possibilities may emerge from such a meeting. What can we learn about feature of our own world from taking the perspective of a past world? A considerable part of the data being used and examined will be gained from virtual experiences that are being created within the project.

Time travelling on the market of experiences engages with the way in which time travelling is linked to larger social trends associated with the emergence of the so-called Experience Economy. We are asking about the social and economic framework within which time travelling has become popular, and at what cost.

Designing time-travels involves practical work that is being carried out as part of several Masters dissertations at the University of Lund. The idea is that the students’ ideas, with additional technical help from the Humanities Lab and the Virtual Reality Lab at the Ingvar Kamprad Design Centrum, will eventually be implemented in the museums that are involved in the project.

Evaluating time-travels takes up a number of important ethical questions that emerge from practical time travelling. What happens when time travelling to a specific historical event becomes very unpleasant and disturbing for the traveller, and where are the limits of what is acceptable? Does the most important value of time-travelling lie in providing us with moral challenges, for example causing us to rethink our own values or norms in the light of experiences of another age?

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