This issue starts with an old obsession of mine: books that catalog the history of art+tech.
MoMA’s Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects still feels useful because it catches a moment when interaction design, art, objects, data, systems, and networked life were being worked out in public. The projects in that catalogue were not floating outside history. They were responding to the texture of their moment, and they read differently now because the world around them has changed.
That is also why Matt Webb’s Poem/1 clock and my own PoemOS project feel like useful companion pieces. A poetry clock can be charming, unsettling, playful, technically impressive, and socially awkward all at once, depending on where and when you encounter it.
Week 23 follows that thread through hand-cranked local AI, a new citizens’ assembly on the future in Italy, a note about Nvidia and AI PCs, ImaginationLancaster, my brother Marcus Bleecker’s feature film Mississippi Scholar, and a Tomorrow’s Jobs Today posting for a Speculative Impacts and Plausible Implications Team Leader.
The shared question is how small artifacts, cultural surfaces, institutions, and strange job descriptions help possible futures become available for thought.
Read the full issue:
Week 23 Year 26: Past, Present, and Future of Art+Tech
Subscribe to the newsletter:
Near Future Laboratory Newsletter
See Also
A companion note for Near Future Laboratory newsletter Week 23 Year 26, pointing to the HTML archive version of the issue.