About
The pages guests receive to leave messages, on the blank side, for a time capsule intended for 500 years from now.
An Apothecary Dreams is a gentle, phantasmagorical art/experience installation set within the “theory and practice”-based academic environment of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
You’ll have the opportunity to touch, taste, smell, hear, and see the “time capsules” WPI graduate student Katherine Crighton has found and opened as they’ve researched and reconstructed household apothecary recipes from the Scientific Revolution.
When you’re ready to return to the modern world, you’ll be invited to add your own page to a time capsule Katherine is building for the same kind of distant world that our forebears could not have imagined, but hoped for nonetheless: one 500 years in the future.
What will you be stepping into? See a portion of it in the photo gallery below…
Within ‘The Time Capsule Opens’: Dried herbs hang in front of a pair of enormous pages from Moyse Charas’s The Royal Pharmacopœea (1678), a work that acts like a Rosetta Stone for the anyone seeking to understand the transitioning world of apothecary and its entrance into the public sphere.
Within ‘The Kitchen’: Family recipes are the modern world’s version of household journals, collecting and keeping memories of our past for some future reader. We use the same herbs and spices; sometimes in different ways, and sometimes with different meanings, but the echo stays the same.
Within ‘The Workshop’: Ingredients that are referenced in primary source materials, but can’t be used. All reconstructions are, at their heart, inaccurate; but recording that truth in this moment of time is important for those who will look back on us in the future.
Within ‘The Garden’: Many live plants used in household apothecary are still present today, though their names and usage may have changed. The Garden has live examples that can be touched and smelled, and mounted herbal illustrations of many others.
In the background, a painting of Aldous Higgins looks over ‘The Talking Books’, where guests can hear the tones of different writers as Katherine hears them.
An element of ‘The Time Capsule Continues’: A pile of the collected pages from playtests conducted over the summer of 2025, anonymized and intended for 500 years in the future. It was suggested that the messages, written on the blank side, be about science, but submitters could ultimately choose their own.
Examples, from upper left and then clockwise: “Be very, very careful with KMnO4 and [obscured].” “Every time period feels like the worst one when you’re [obscured]” “Primroses are a spring flower in northern England.” “[obscured] joy is an act of fierce defiance”