Between 26-30th of August 2020 The Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) held a virtual ‘Futures’ conference where Sunrise With Sea Monsters presented a panel discussion alongside a screening of the film.

 

The three speakers included in the discussion all appeared as interviewees for the original film in 2018, they are:

 

Martin Kunze - founder of Memory of Mankind (MoM) a ‘bottom-up’ history archive stored on ceramic tablets in the oldest salt mine in the world in a mountain in Hallstatt, Austria.

 

Prof Peter Kazansky - lead physicist at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton developing a long-term data storage technology called the 5D Memory Crystal, that can potentially outlive the whole universe.

 

Dr David Roden - philosopher of speculative posthumanism. He is the author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human.

 

In the panel discussion the four panellists including myself discuss each panellists work since the making of the film and the impact Covid-19 has had on them and their work. We also discuss, amongst many other things, future posthuman interpretations of our current knowledge, future deep-time archeologies, cultural contexts of current histories, and truth in the age of right-wing ideologies.

 

This is a longer version of the original panel discussion.