Imaginative Restoration

In a distant future, humanity has retreated underground to escape an increasingly inhospitable surface. In subterranean grottos, the Storytellers safeguard fragments of the past — and they do more than preserve them. Through a process they call Imaginative Restoration, they breathe new life into them.

Imaginative Restoration is an interactive installation made with the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and the NIDA Future Centre. You hand-draw a creature and watch it woven, live, into damaged black-and-white archival footage — adding colour, movement and imagined life to scenes from the past.

From workshop to installation#

In 2024 we collaborated with the NFSA and NIDA on a three-day workshop exploring generative AI and its place in creative practice. The workshop grew out of a simple recognition: generative AI is reshaping creativity, and institutions and practitioners need to engage with the technology and interrogate it, not merely adopt it.

One idea stood out:

Can we use AI to project and augment stories of the past?

That question became Imaginative Restoration: an installation where you draw your own image and see it woven into archival footage. It is a playful, hands-on way to experiment with generative AI while reimagining history in entirely new ways.

The Rewilding Division#

Imaginative Restoration: Rewilding Division casts you as a Storyteller. Your mission is to creatively restore damaged archival films from the NFSA: to dream up flora and fauna and repopulate the scenes, hand-drawing the creatures you imagine and watching them enter the film in real time, colouring the black-and-white footage of the past.

The installation is the result of an exploratory collaboration. It emerged from a workshop held in Canberra in July 2024, where experts in dramatic writing, props and effects, curation and digital technology came together to explore the future of the dramatic arts — their creation, recording and archiving — in the age of generative AI.

The installation is on display on Level 3 of the Birch Building in Canberra.

A Cybernetic Studio project by Ben Swift, in collaboration with the NIDA Future Centre and the National Film and Sound Archive. To learn more, contact Ben Swift. Code: github.com/ANUcybernetics/imaginative-restoration.

@misc{swift2024imaginativerestoration,
  author    = {Ben Swift},
  title     = {Imaginative Restoration},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.20780691},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20780691},
  note      = {Cybernetic Studio, ANU School of Cybernetics}
}