The Futurist Cookbook, published in 1932, is a collection of nonsensical “recipes” that challenge readers’ sensory experiences of eating. Artist Allan Wexler and collaborator Joey Rubin reimagine that concept for the 21st century in Working Titles For A New Futurist Cookbook, a visual feast of drawings, multimedia objects, images, and installations paired with recipes that provoke the reader to reevaluate the habitual ways we use and source food—our patterns and rituals of eating, farming, cooking, and dining.

Imagine a science class that’s as fun and interactive as a multiplayer video game. That’s what artist Bayeté Ross Smith and collaborator Latoya Peterson are creating in Droppin’ Science, a game that combines the improvisational creativity of hip-hop with actual science lessons to create an engaging, brain-expanding experience—and to introduce players to real-life BIPOC scientists at the same time. 

A lifetime of artwork lost—or collected, permanently stored, and saved. Datalogue Raisonné is a cloud-based, blockchain inventory tool that not only scans individual works of art and transforms visual information into a permanent digital record, but also correlates and sites that information with the work’s original provenance data

We can do together what we can’t do alone. In Synch.Live, artist Hillary Leone and collaborators Daniel Bor and Dagmar Divjak take inspiration from self-organizing systems found in nature—like flocks of birds or swarms of ants—to create a series of game-like events in which people learn to work together to solve a group challenge without using words.

Seagrass is alive, abundant, and a potential answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. In Seagrass: Revitalizing Our Waterways, artist Kayla Weisdorf engages in a yearlong project to grow eelgrass in the Newtown Creek Alliance’s Living Docks, documenting through video the world’s largest seagrass restoration project. She also creates public landscape designs intended to help spark a new relationship between people and the living creatures in their environment.

The foundation of impactful and effective questioning is engaging our “Ethical Imagination” (E.I.), a term first presented as a call to action in 2015 in Nairobi by Kenyan writer and scholar Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Utilizing the mechanism of blockchain, which is the record-keeping technology behind the cryptocurrency network known as Bitcoin, “E.I.” will create a conceptual framework in the form of an indelible registry of ideas that can be committed to as “thinking acts.” These ideas have the potential to positively change society in a radical manner—to be just, equitable, and scalable. 

Your backyard. A neighbor’s stoop. The line of shrubs along the sidewalk. In NATURESHIP, artist Nicole Mackinlay trains an eye on these urban microhabitats and explores their relevance to how we, as individuals and communities, are facing the challenges of climate change, overdevelopment, and loss of space. Combining technology with ecology, she imagines a new kind of resilience in which nature and humans, in ecosystems as local and small as a rooftop or a balcony garden, can learn to evolve together.

Using the growing reach and influence of algorithmic systems, Binary Calculations Can Not Assess Us explores what care and governance of the people, by the people, and for the people can look like in an A.I.-mediated world. Artist Stephanie Dinkins and collaborator Surya Mattu aim to create interventions that challenge existing power structures and offer different models of building civic infrastructure. This project is a first step towards making resources that allow for care, meaningful engagement, and that redefine the dynamic between people and power.