Remembering the Future, MIT Museum, MA, 2025
Echelman’s new sculpture installation Remembering the Future premieres at the MIT Museum on September 18, 2025.
The artwork widens our perspective in time, giving sculptural form to the history of the Earth’s climate from the last ice age to the present moment, and then branching out to visualize multiple potential futures. The past and future meet at a single point, posing the question: “What does it mean to be human now, knowing what we know about the past and estimations for the future?”
The artwork is braided with colored twines and ropes which are knotted and spliced into three-dimensional form which is suspended throughout the lobby and ascending staircase. The public can view the artwork from Kendall Square through the museum’s glass facade by daylight and nightly with illumination, along with a monumental two-sided screen presenting video timelapse contextualizing its creation and the artist’s public art projects on five continents.
The sculpture was created during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) as the Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist. The accompanying exhibition includes a new interactive experience directed by Prof. Caitlin Mueller from the MIT Departments of Architecture and of Civil and Environmental Engineering who collaborated closely with Echelman over the last three years. A kiosk in the lobby, in addition to an online version accessible through a QR code, enables visitors to directly adjust the sculpture’s form and understand the engineering forces and view how equilibrium is achieved in real time.
The artist’s climate research for this project was guided by Prof. Raffaele Ferrari, co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center, using an application programming interface that links the En-ROADS software developed by MIT’s Sloan, Climate Interactive, and Ventana Systems with a climate model emulator developed by the MIT Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge project. The emulator converts emissions projected by En-ROADS to predict regional changes in climate variables such as temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather events.
The installation title, Remembering the Future, draws inspiration from the writings of Søren Kierkegaard: “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.” Remembering the Future explores both the cultural and emotional aspects of what it means to be human at this moment, making sense of the breadth of information of our climate’s past and its implications for the future of our species and planet.
Materials and size
Hand-spliced knotted and braided high-tenacity polyester, programmed LED lighting, DMX controller, dancers, and video.
Dimensions: 67 × 24 × variable height up to 35 ft.
Location
MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA