In a distant future, humanity has retreated underground to escape increasingly inhospitable surface conditions. Here, in subterranean grottos, the Storytellers safeguard fragments of the past. But they don’t merely preserve these artefacts—they breathe new life into them through a process called Imaginative Restoration.
In 2024, we collaborated with the National Film and Sound Archive and the NIDA Future Centre to co-create a three-day workshop exploring Generative Al and its role in creative practice. This workshop was driven by a recognition of the profound impact Generative Al is having on creativity and the need for institutions and creative practitioners to engage with and interrogate this evolving technology.
What came out of those three days sparked the next phase of the collaboration.
One idea stood out: Can we use Al to project and augment stories of the past?
That question led to “Imaginative Restoration,” an interactive installation where users can draw their own image, which is then woven into archival footage from the past. It’s a playful, hands-on experience that invites you to experiment with Generative Al while reimagining history in entirely new ways.
This interactive installation is currently on display on Level 3, Birch Building in Canberra.
Imaginative Restoration: Rewilding Division is an immersive installation that invites participants to step into the role of a Storyteller.
Your mission?
To interact with and creatively restore damaged archival films from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). As a Storyteller in the Rewilding Division you work to dream up and repopulate the scenes with Australian flora and fauna, by hand drawing the creatures you can imagine, in live time you will see them enter the footage of the film, adding colour to the black and white scenes of the past.
Storytellers is the result of an exploratory collaboration, emerging from a workshop held in Canberra during July 2024 where experts in dramatic writing, props and effects, curation, and digital technologies came together to explore the future of dramatic arts creation, recording, and archiving in the age of generative AI.
To learn more about this project contact Charlotte Bradley or Ben Swift.
If you would like to explore the code behind this project, visit our Github.
