The full piece
Segments
The piece in the five parts it was made in, each ending where the original handed over to the next.
Emma Kay’s work reconstructs epic histories, geographies and fictions entirely from memory. The Future From Memory turns the method forwards: a history of the world still to come, from the twenty-first century to the thirty-second and beyond, told in 269 paragraphs.
It was made in Macromedia Flash in five segments, each loading the next, and distributed on CD in 2003 to run full-screen from a projector program on Mac and Windows. Flash Player is no longer supported anywhere, so in 2026 the original files were played back in Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator, and rendered to video frame by frame.
Every video is here twice. The original piece had an aspect ratio of 4:3; the widescreen 16:9 version here removes the top quarter of the picture, which is blank in every frame, so no text is lost.
The piece in the five parts it was made in, each ending where the original handed over to the next.