Visitors to Cultural Heritage (CH) sites are often only able to observe the current degraded state of these locations without the understanding of their history and personal connection possessed by local inhabitants. To facilitate expression of this intangible aspects of CH, we collected Generative AI (GenAI) created images of the past and future of CH sites from workshop participants, and displayed these images in Augmented Reality (AR) form, and as drawn by a physical drawing robot. The collected imagined CH images are shown in an AR app that uses markers on a large scale 3D map model of the city. The images are also drawn physically by a robot when visitors mention the names of the CH in answering questions to a chat query, serving as markers created in progress for the AR. Visitors found the experience engaging for illuminating intangible connections of people to CH sites. This work highlights the way GenAI-created images can be shown in AR and physical forms to empower imagination and expression for social purpose. GenAI and virtual interactions serve as tool for creative re-constitution in a post-reality world that tells truths not only by physical reality, but also by an augmented representation of the truth found in peoples’ minds.

Reality is not just what we can see; it’s inside our minds, it’s the substance that let us tell the stories we have in the way we tell them. Future realities (not just single reality) is an image of our memories, speculation, and desires, because all these and more can be instantiated in the form of post-truths, digital environments, and AI-based systems for expressing ourselves as an alternative vision to the material world. Our work, “the present in the future is the past,” is an expression of the importance of the way imagine and re-imagine as part of the heritage of human culture. We used a workshop provocation to allow participants to imagine their local cultural heritage locations through an image-generation process, creating both images and videos that are then instantiated as AR art-works on both a robot-drawing platform and a projection-based AR system.

For online dissemination we create a series of informative videos about the process of the art creation (https://youtu.be/qmGxhvYvLYA), documentation of the exhibition (https://youtu.be/6xOzda7ixTY and https://youtu.be/N9MyY4Jxc4w), and narrative (https://youtu.be/Pw_9DDWTZPs). The story illuminates the reality of the future where the images in our minds, shown in augmented and AI-robotics supported systems, are just as an integral part of the creative expression in regards to our connections with the spaces with occupy, as the physical reality itself.