Artifacts of the presence era: visualizing presence for posterity

We present Artifacts of the Presence Era, an art installation that uses a geological metaphor to create an impressionistic visualization of the evolving history in a museum's gallery. The piece captures people's presence in the galleries: the images and sounds of visitors as they move through the museum. People's rhythms and activities in this public space become the accumulating layers in a growing landscape of past events. We designed the piece so that visitors could move through the layers of the history, behaving like archaeologists, "excavating" the traces left in the visualization to get a sense of how the space had been used over time.