The idea of being online is in danger of extinction from redundancy. The Internet has become the principal site of construction, defense, storage and dissemination of new knowledge and social identity alike. Facebook’s population will soon eclipse that of China, and its holdouts nonetheless have well-formed electric selves in the servers of the NSA. As our physical world is increasingly tapped, scanned, streamed, imaged and mapped in realtime, the province of offline is a shrinking territory. In each wave of digitization—the archival, the social, the physical—the evidence of its arrival and its path to maturity are the same: search. For David Joselit, ...

Message in a Bottle is an assemblage of interlocking plastic bottles that are intended for water, medical supplies and then used as building elements to create a shelter in the event of a natural catastrophe. Each bottle includes a “micro-message” – a story of how to reuse plastic bottles, making evident their effect on the global plastisphere — visible to viewers with the help of optic lens. The installation is designed as an interactive playspace, where bottles can be used as building blocks containing secret messages. Message in a Bottle fosters a dialogue on topics relating to recycling of industrial products ...

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar. She is an assistant professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, the author of the book The Architecture of Closed Worlds and is the co-curator of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale. In this conversation, Jarrett and Lydia talk about being an architect who doesn’t build, Lydia’s concept of ‘immersive scholarship’, and alternative forms of disseminating research.

The future never felt closer than it does today. A series of environmental, technological and social shifts are affecting today’s world and the human’s role within it. Continuous urbanization, the impact of the anthropogenic activity on the natural environment, the increasing use of algorithmic systems in all sectors of life, and the growing asymmetries of power among territories and populations, are all central issues at stake. How possible is it to address the future and the changes already taking place? This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.