What: An encyclopaedic Digital engine whereby a user selects a date/location/era and immediately immerses themselves in that time period—seeing how it felt to be ordinary, tracking patterns across eras, and revealing how power structures engineered the traumas we still carry.
Why:
We are living the unresolved echoes of our ancestors' experiences. Project Next of Kin is built upon the core, poetically-grounded belief that modern crises of identity, disconnection and inner turmoil are not merely personal failings but the living inheritance of centuries of lived experience under specific power structures, economic pressures and belief systems. History, as commonly preserved, has been a narrative of the victors, the elite and the extraordinary. The lives of women, the working classes and marginalised communities—the overwhelming majority of our kin—have been largely omitted, rendering the past inaccessible and irrelevant to many. Project NOK challenges this by centring these very voices. It argues that by reconstructing their world not with fictionalised biography, but with "Contextual Illumination," we can provide both a powerful diagnostic tool and a balm for the soul. It allows an individual to trace the contours of intergenerational trauma and resilience and to see their own struggles as part of a longer, collective story. This project is a proposed intervention: to democratise hindsight, fostering a profound sense of belonging by showing every user that they are the living endpoint of a long, resilient line.
How
Primary Aim: To design, build and disseminate a public digital platform ("The Time Machine") that illuminates the connections between the lived experiences of ordinary people in Britain (1538-present) and contemporary societal patterns.