1Future is a global platform that educates and empowers multi-generational and diverse audiences with stories of social change and innovation. Future Memory is a collaborative art project founded by Cannon Hersey and Akira Fujimoto that preserves the meaning of the memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and presents the memory of war and disaster as a new experience for the present and the future. It applies the latest technologies to create a sensory record of objects that convey human stories, helping to educate, inspire and empower people by embracing even our most painful past, and to promote healing through creativity.
“The sculpture aspires to calcify an understanding of the atomic-bomb survivor’s trauma. It memorialises that trauma in an artwork for the time when there are no more survivors to tell their story and to save us from the use of another atomic bomb, as they have done for the past 79 years.”
- Cannon Hersey, artist
Cannon Hersey is the grandson of John Hersey, the journalist who wrote “Hiroshima”, the New Yorker article that drew the world’s attention to what had happened in the city and was later published as a book. All global licensing fees for the article during the year of its publication were donated to the Red Cross in 1947 as a tribute to the organisation’s important work on the ground in Hiroshima.
“The memories of radiation exposure have been preserved through storytelling and photographs, as well as in various other ways. Future Memory offers a new experience through artworks made using modern technology. We hope that people will continue to connect this experience to the future as their own memory.”
- Akira Fujimoto, artist