As we age, we constantly change, and earlier versions of ourselves become memories relegated to the past. Naturally, many memories fade over time and are eventually forgotten, but humans have a desire to hold onto memories [ Alexander 2002, Waggoner et al., 2023]. Memories serve a purpose not only to emotionally reflect on the journey of life, but also to make enable individuals to make informed decisions based on one’s own experience. We define “TeleAbsence'' as an exploratory design of Telepresence in the past or with others who are gone, to provide a sense of “being there” with the presence of a lost loved one or a lost period in ones life. For example, recalling the memory of a kitchen where an individual and a loved one cooked and ate together, a library where they read poems together, a seashore where they strolled together collecting beautiful seashells, or a night train on which they traveled together. 

Our vision for TeleAbsence considers methods for preserving an individual’s inner life to enable pathways for continued bonds to expand beyond an individual’s personal experience into interaction design. How you remember someone, through either their postcards, paintings, letters or diaries, enables us to think about how someone experiences the world. How you remember someone could be through a real interaction you had with them, or something he or she left behind in writing, drawing or sculpting, or what someone taught you. TeleAbsence enables us to consider how we could replicate the experience of knowing someone without their presence. Our vision of TeleAbsence is an interpretation of telepresence that, unlike telepresence’s focus on asynchronous communication across physical distance, instead addresses emotional and temporal distance caused by the loss or fading memory of loved ones. Our vision of TeleAbsence questions how to be remembered and how to remember, a transcendent approach to HCI to integrate the human spirit with the design potentials of human-computer interaction, evoking ideas like traces of reflection and remote time