Future Library

What does it mean to preserve something for a future we will never see? The Future Library in Oslo, poised between memory, time and access, emerges, on the one hand, as an alternative to the logic of digitalisation and immediacy; on the other, as a device that prompts reflection on mortality and responsibility towards the future

What happens if one attempts to narrate an artistic project using the tools of scientific research? Future Library is a work conceived in 2014 by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson in Oslo and, in recent years, it has become the subject of studies within cultural policy and futures studies.

The project is, perhaps, well known: one thousand trees planted in the Nordmarka forest, one hundred writers invited to submit an unpublished manuscript, a century of waiting before those texts can be printed and read. Each year, an author deposits a secret work, kept in the Silent Room of the Deichman public library. In 2114, the trees will be turned into paper and the hundred manuscripts will become a book. Authors are asked to write «in the hope of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future»: a formulation that immediately shifts the project from the artistic to the theoretical plane, as it implies a wager on continuity between institutions, language and a community of readers not yet born.

Yet it is above all two recent studies that interpret the Future Library as a device that interrogates the relationship between memory, technology and the future. The first¹, published in 2026 by Norwegian researcher Marianne Takle in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, places the project in relation to the Norwegian National Library’s digitisation programme; the second², published in 2025 in the Journal of Futures Studies, analyses public reactions to the project via social media.

Two visions of the future

As Norwegian researcher Marianne Takle observes, digitisation is «redefining the objectives, infrastructures and temporal orientations» of institutions concerned with cultural memory.

Her study examines two Norwegian cases that respond in radically different ways to this transformation. On the one hand, the digitisation programme of the Norwegian National Library, launched in 2006 by the government, aims to convert the entire national cultural heritage — books, newspapers, images, films — into digital format and progressively make it accessible online. On the other hand, the Future Library employs the same functions — collection, preservation, dissemination — but radically redefines them. Texts are collected through annual rituals, preserved in print form and withheld from reading for one hundred years, while their dissemination is deferred to a distant future. The article’s argument is that both projects stage extreme responses to the same historical transformation: the rise of digital communication and the redefinition of the relationship between culture, time and access.

The theoretical framework adopted by Takle combines the utopian method of sociologist Ruth Levitas (1949) with the theory of social acceleration developed by philosopher Hartmut Rosa (1965). According to Levitas, utopia is not a blueprint for a perfect society to be realised, but a critical tool. It serves a very concrete purpose: to make visible the alternatives hidden within the present. Rosa theorises that modernity is characterised by continuous acceleration, a “dynamic stabilisation” in which the speed of technologies increases, the pace of social change intensifies, and the quantity of experiences we attempt to compress into time expands. This acceleration is accompanied by an ever stronger desire for control. Read together, these approaches allow Takle to make a decisive move: if the future is a cultural construction, and if modernity tends towards acceleration and control, then projects such as the Future Library are not merely artistic experiments but devices that deliberately suspend the dominant logics of the present in order to pose a question: what happens to culture when it is voluntarily removed from the logic of acceleration? Culture no longer coincides with the consumption of content.

From this perspective, the National Library’s digitisation pursues the democratic ideal of universal access to heritage: the user of the future is imagined as someone who must be able to find everything, immediately, anywhere. A «bank of national memory» which, for Takle, risks embodying a genuine utopia of control.Moreover, digital preservation requires constant updating, and the vast Norwegian digital archive risks becoming a cultural machine that promises memory but can only function through relentless innovation.

The library as an experience of resonance

Takle interprets the Future Library as a form of intentional deceleration «which entails a deliberate withdrawal for a certain period».

«In this deceleration, text and material are intertwined. The text is currently unknown and its content holds no meaning for those of us living today, except as a representation of an inaccessible library».

This is not a unique case, as other libraries and archives also hold books and materials that are not accessible to the public (the most well known is perhaps the Vatican Apostolic Archive). This withdrawal creates, at least potentially, the conditions for what Rosa calls resonance: a non-instrumental relationship with the world, in which experience is not governed by control but by a willingness to be touched, transformed and moved by something we cannot possess or use immediately. The Silent Room, with its silence, the wood from the forest, the drawers that hold unreadable texts, does not communicate information but constructs an experience of distance, waiting and limitation.

Each year, in the Nordmarka forest, the Future Library takes shape through a public ceremony that marks the passage of time within the project.. Participants walk together along a path through the woods until they reach the area where the manuscript handover takes place. The invited author reads a short passage from the text — one of the few moments in which the work comes into contact with the present — before the manuscript is formally entrusted to the city of Oslo for safekeeping. The audience observes in silence, sharing an experience of suspension.

For this reason, the project has acquired, within the lexicon of futures studies³, a significance that exceeds the boundaries of public art: it can be read as a form of futures engagement, as it compels the public to confront a temporal horizon that is real but not experientially accessible; as speculative design, because it constructs in the present a device intended for future users, institutions and material conditions; and as an archive of the future, as it prepares the possibility of a memory yet to come.

Discovering one’s own end

In May 2023, during the annual ceremony in the Nordmarka forest in Oslo, two researchers — Rachel Cranmer and Jenny Liu Zhang — documented the event and posted a 65-second video on TikTok. From that recording, viewed by over 600,000 users, emerged a study⁴ published in 2025 in the Journal of Futures Studies, analysing the reactions the work generates online. The authors examined 576 public comments, using a combination of thematic analysis and causal layered analysis to address two fundamental questions: how does the public respond to a work that exceeds the span of human life?

The most interesting finding is qualitative in nature: the analysed audience — predominantly young women aged between 18 and 34, based in the United States — responds in a highly emotional and reflective way. The most frequent categories identified in the study are positive emotions, complex emotions and awareness of mortality. In many cases, encountering the project triggers a sudden realisation: the understanding that those books will exist, but that they themselves will not be alive to read them.

This awareness, described in the paper as mortality salience, generates ambivalent reactions: wonder, anxiety, curiosity, but also a desire for continuity. As clearly stated in the analysis: «Although the video does not explicitly state that viewers will no longer be alive when the work is completed, the Future Library inevitably prompts them to confront their own lifespan and mortality. Many, for instance, began calculating how old they would be — or how long they would have to live — in order to witness the project’s conclusion». Almost none of those who know the project today will be alive when the texts are read. Yet this fracture can also produce, the research suggests, a form of “symbolic immortality”, an ability to conceive of oneself as part of a broader continuity made up of stories, institutions and acts of care.

The strength of the study lies precisely here: the authors suggest that works of this kind — defined as long-running artworks, that is, projects conceived on exceptionally long time scales — can activate early forms of futures thinking and futures stewardship, namely a sense of symbolic responsibility towards the future. The fact that this dynamic emerges on a platform such as TikTok, often dismissed as the realm of short attention spans, reinforces the study’s findings: even within the most accelerated media environments, a work built on slowness can open a space for radical reflection. Future Library introduces another possibility: to think of the future as a civic and imaginative pact between the living and those not yet born. It reconstructs the conditions under which a society might still believe it is worthwhile to entrust words, matter and trust to a century it will never see.

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1. Read more: Takle, M. (2026). Analogue and digital future imaginaries in an accelerated society: Norway’s national library digitalisation programme and the future library artwork. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2026.2645036 ↩︎
2. Read the article: Journal of Futures Studies. (2025, September 1). The Seeds of Futures Engagement: Oslo’s Future Library and Mortality Awareness on TikTok * Journal of Futures Studies. https://jfsdigital.org/2025-2/vol-30-no-1-september-2025/the-seeds-of-futures-engagement-oslos-future-library-and-mortality-awareness-on-tiktok-2/ ↩︎
3. Future studies (or futures studies) is an interdisciplinary field that analyses, imagines, and constructs possible futures, not to predict them in a deterministic manner, but to understand alternative scenarios and guide decision-making in the present ↩︎
4. Read further: Journal of Futures Studies. (2025, September 1). The Seeds of Futures Engagement: Oslo’s Future Library and Mortality Awareness on TikTok * Journal of Futures Studies. https://jfsdigital.org/2025-2/vol-30-no-1-september-2025/the-seeds-of-futures-engagement-oslos-future-library-and-mortality-awareness-on-tiktok-2/ ↩︎