Imagine entering a time portal. You can rewind time to encounter your partner before you were together or seek out a future version of them when they are older. Would you still develop a close relationship with them? How about facing someone completely different from the one you’re used to and being too traumatised to confront the present?
Toy-like beeps punctuate the air as the Ikarie XB-1 spaceship zips across the cosmos. A rickety robot called Patrick clumsily rolls across the floor, answering commands from its owner in a deadpan voice. Accustomed to advanced computer-generated graphics and visual effects, modern-day audience members may find this black-and-white footage from the 1963 sci-fi film Ikarie XB-1 quaint and unsophisticated.
Click. A snap on the camera captures a moment in time, whether it is a fresh graduate collecting his degree scroll or a couple raising their glasses to a toast at their wedding. Before the age of smartphones, we printed photographs and arranged them neatly into albums that tell stories of our past. Most of us still keep troves of them tucked away in old drawers, documenting scenes where our memories fail us.