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present, with improved aesthetic qualities and hyperrealism. The notion of timeless-
ness, together with these representations, can have cognitive and emotional effects.
In this regard, we can observe how recordings of people from the immediate past
have already been used to interact with people of the present, for example. By
superimposing their images and voices, show business has been able to get Natalie
Cole to sing with her late father Nat King Cole at a live gala.
2
What we are alluding
to here in particular, however, is the exacerbation of these capacities, made possible
by technological development. This increased capacity will even lead to the genera-
tion of new representations of people and facts from the past for immersive con-
sumption in the present and future that will, moreover, be available to everybody.
We are not far from being able to recover/simulate the image of dead human beings,
whether affectively close or not, and make them part of our real present (and future)
narrative with a high degree of accuracy, verisimilitude and realism. These experi-
ences, to continue with the example, could even shift from being one-off into con-
stant experiences. Our perspective system, which is able to become engaged in the
audiovisual contract and accept simulations as real, can integrate them in our con-
ception of the present (and future) reality. And all of this leads us to ask: what will
the characteristics be of a future imagined on the basis of narratives taken from the
past and modifi ed by the creative use of digital instruments? How will the future be
affected by our increased narrative modifi cation of the past?
5.7
Projecting Ourselves Into the Future:
Memory and the Future
A large body of researchers in the fi eld of cognitive sciences sustains that all organisms
capable of having a long-term memory are necessarily future orientated (Klein
2013a
).
The greater the capacity of our memory, the more capacity we have to imagine the
future. So, if we have a better memory of the past, we could have more variability in the
future. Research sustains that the capacity to imagine and plan one's personal future
(especially those plans that are not associated to current urges and needs) is essentially
based on the memory of past circumstances and contingencies, which produces enor-
mous selective advantages for those who have such an ability (Klein
2013b
).
The above means that we are future to a great extent through the past. This is
because humans typically have complex memories and a broad temporal range on
which we orientate ourselves and produce our imaginations. Thanks to this sophis-
tication, we protect ourselves from future contingencies, from those that transcend
our needs and emotional states (Bischof-Koehler
1985
; Klein et al.
2010
; Suddendorf
and Corballis
1997
). Remembering, therefore, is evolutional because it serves to
anticipate. In an adaptive sense, it is believed that as fl exibility, complexity and the
temporal extension of imaginations about the future increase, the capacity to have
proactive and goal-orientated responses to one's environment increases (Klein
2013b
). We therefore need to remember.
