Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler have a video installation running nightly at the Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park, called Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come. It's a long-term commission from Waterloo Greenway, the nonprofit building out the urban park system along the creek, and it's on view through March 2029.

The whole thing starts with the ground right under the park. Archaeologists digging along Waller Creek turned up a collection of everyday historic artifacts—buttons, plates, marbles, bottles, coins, bullets, keys—dating from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Those objects were kept at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at UT, and Hubbard and Birchler spent more than a year studying them. They rendered those small, discarded things as monumentally scaled image projections that fill a 16-foot by 120-foot wall, where they drift in a choreographed free fall. The loop runs 27 minutes and is paired with a score by New York composer Alex Weston.

Hubbard and Birchler have collaborated since 1990 and are professors in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, so there's a local connection here that goes beyond just the site. The installation takes things that were once lost in the dirt and blows them up to a scale you can't ignore, turning a handful of old buttons and coins into something that fills the air.

It's free to see. It runs nightly from an hour after sunset until 10 PM, except on evenings when a ticketed concert or other special event is taking place at the amphitheater. Since it's on view through March 2029, you've got plenty of time to catch it whenever you're near Waterloo Park.