Sammy Keane and Sophie Ungless: Box of Life

The Box of Life is a long-term collaborative project started by Sammy Keane and Sophie Ungless. From the exterior, this piece looks like a simple, wooden box, but inside the viewer will find a 200-page journal with each page headed with a year, starting with 2019 and continuing until 2219. Additionally, there are writing utensils and a list of instructions for the project included inside the box. The guidelines lay out the intention of the project: The Box of Life is an evolving and collaborative time capsule that moves from person to person and years pass. The box will be given to a new person at the beginning of each year, and they are in charge of documenting that year in whatever way they see fit on the respective page in the journal. The participants can record their year from a personal or more objective standpoint; however, they are required to stick to only one page. They are also asked to include a dated picture of themselves in the box. Instead of including technology like a USB that can hold multiple documents and folders, we chose to use something more “analog,” the journal, because technology will inevitably advance, and something like a flash drive will become obsolete.

The instructions also make it very clear that it is vital to the project that nothing is removed from the box, only added. The piece will hold information gathered over the next 200 years, and if anything were to be removed, there would be gaps in the timeline. This project alludes to the importance of history and how it allows one to make sense of the current world. We invite each person who comes across the piece to read through the journal from the beginning, look at the pictures gathered, and think about how times have changed since 2019. They will read something much more personal and with more perspectives than a traditional history book, which we hope builds inspiration to keep the project going.

For this piece, we were inspired by longevity as a concept, which is a theme that we see present in Julia Christensen and JPL’s Tree of Life project. We were intrigued by how their mission would last, evolve, and keep people engaged over the next 200 years. This is something that we wanted to explore, which is why we chose to make our piece a collaboration. Our hope is that if people see that they are an essential part of our project, it will keep their attention and interest. Similarly to the Tree of Life, this is a project that is accessible to everyone, and hope can be used as a tool of reference. Both projects create a record of time: Christensen’s is more abstract and auditory, whereas our piece more directly recounts the passage of 200 years. We chose the 200-year time frame because it directly reflects the Tree of Life and its introduction of longevity. However, that number is arbitrary, and both projects have the possibility of extending longer if there is enough public interest.