"This time around, we selected 15 projects that interrogate the
futures of place. Together, they present diverse interpretations of
‘speculative geography,’ realised across urban, rural and temporal
fabrics. Topics range from psychogeographic meanderings through
Kathmandu and the psychic topography of New York, to displacement and
belonging in Accra and the Spanish Canary Islands. Others look to
planned cities in Brazil and in a mysterious totalitarian state,
Indonesian arts education, the cartographic sonics of mortgaged real
estate, and placehacking London’s skyline. A third category considers
virtual terrains, with pieces on the socially mediated red carpet, and
the need for a new politics to go with our increasingly weird techy
futures. And lastly, the purely speculative: a corpus of networked
lighthouses in New Zealand, an Afghan agricultural belt-made-machine, a
carnivalistic, biosynthetic robot zoo and what would have happened if
the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin."
"In this volume, designed by Lejla Redja, we continued to
experiment with design. How else might we be able to suggest a reverse
skeuomorph, and implicate the screen on a page? Does navigating the
bookform insist on mechanical gestures, like the page flip? Must the
leaves be attached, glued, or stitched? Or can we extend the metaphor
of tabbed browsing, and store data