The Rare Books Room staff have been thinking a lot about the future. Guided by research, classic literature, science fiction, and artificial intelligence, these materials provide a glimpse into the unknown.
Included in this display:
Cooksey’s Blight uses Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem of the same name to reflect on the 2020 closure of Owen Beach prompted by climate change. Zimmermann’s Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene predicts a future where climate change has transformed our environment into a haunting hellscape.
The Manual for Domestic Robot Keana-35 is a collaborative guidebook by artist Shih “Ayo” Yunyu, author Tse Pakchai, and comic artist June Lee inspired by the sci-fi novel Mercy Buddha which predicts that, by the year of 2035, every household in Hong Kong possesses a domestic robot. Lambelet’s Happiness is the Only True Emotion reflects on facial recognition software by challenging the accuracy of the Microsoft Cognitive Emotion API to recognize emotion in human faces. It can only recognize happiness with certitude.
In Sound Strategies for Contemporary Time Travel, Crane suggests that a careful embodied listening or music practice and a focus on the time-dimensionality of sound might help us weather the winds of extreme change brought by attempting non-linearity.
Rachel Simmons and Chrissy Kolaya’s Chance of Pain uses adapted text from Economist magazine's The World Ahead issue and found imagery to challenge the idea that we can ever meaningfully predict the future, that we can ever make sense and order out of an uncertain future.
This dynamic display showcases some of our favorite book structures. Artist books are known to challenge the traditional format of a case-bound codex. Innovative paper forms engage with the readers' senses to expand upon their textual or illustrative meaning. Many of these may leave you wondering: how do I read this?
Bonus Structure: Chance of Pain (from our Speculative Futures display) is a dragon fold book.
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