Katie Paterson - The hundred year artwork

Future Library is an art project that none of us are likely to experience in its completion.

Created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, Future Library is an anthology of books that will be written over the course of one hundred years. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text and the writings will be held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114.

Our challenge was to create a digital representation of this living, breathing, and continuously unfolding artwork. One thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a forest in Norway, which will supply the paper for the printing process in one hundred years time. We used tree rings as the centerpiece of the site, a perfect visual metaphor that combines both the essence of time and growth. Each tree ring represents one year and one author, and users can travel through a century of rings, exploring authors and stories as they’re added.

The artwork isn’t easily accessible, so we wanted to give people a glimpse of what the forest looks and feels like. As time passes, the trees on the site grow and the sounds of the environment become more pronounced, just like the real forest in Nordmarka. It’s our hope that the site will be a source of information for years to come, and a chance for future generations to gain a deeper understanding of this magnificent artwork.