The gap between the tools (the excavator) and the crises (the Evergreen) is an imaginary. The construction of an imaginary, a re-writing of history, allows one to step into the future.
The new imaginary does not necessarily arise from acts of imaginations. Often it is already present in the raw materials we have at hand. It is latent inside the library. There is a process of refactoring, often beginning in the linguistic domain, but manifesting in an ontological shift.
We can conceptualize this shift with reference to the bi-stable images from perceptual psychology. The balerina who rotates both clockwise and counterclockwise. The Necker cube whose orientation is unclear. The dress that is both black and white. The material content does not change, but the perceived gestalt changes entirely.
How to provoke that shift in perception, that re-organization of the archive? This is the role of art, as Alva Noe argues.