Like the visible layers of a canyon, the layers in Artifacts of the Presence Era tell a story of past events. The images and sounds produced in a gallery at Boston's Institute for Contemporary Arts were captured and then visualized as a growing, organic landscape that served as an historical record. Like its natural counterpart, this process revealed long-term patterns (the rhythm of night and day, periods of great activity or empty silence), while retaining occasionally serendipitous, but often mundane, samples of the passage of life. The project visualized the accumulating layers of data and allowed visitors to navigate the captured images and ambient sounds, peeking back into the history of the gallery.