PastPresence — studio

PAST PRESENCE

Face-to-face conversations with conjured presences: historical figures, living legends, invented characters, voices out of lore.

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

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Studio index

One practice, many presences.

The branches change with the audience: heritage and public art, classrooms, museums, and interactive fiction. The same construct runs 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

Public art that brings the history and culture of a place into live, face-to-face conversation. A three-dimensional apparition, housed in material drawn from the region, stone, brick, or wood: visitors talk with archetypes, legends, historical figures, and characters out of local lore, the people history kept and the ones it dropped. 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 built to hold a conversation at the museum, house, or library devoted to them. Visitors ask, push back, and seek out what the figure knew, 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. It turns reading from a passive act into 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.