Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, curated by writer Geoff Manaugh for the Nevada Museum of Art, explores the future of landscape studies by way of the technical intermediaries—the instruments, devices and architectural inventions— through which humans have come to understand the built and natural environments.From autonomous tools for remote archaeology to radio telescopes scanning electromagnetic events in space, by way of colorful mechanisms that allow children to experience the “animal superpowers” of other species, Landscape Futures looks at the extraordinary scientific machines—and their hypothetical alternatives—that filter, augment, clarify, and transformatively reproduce the world they survey.
The result is much more than a catalog of projects past. The book, instead, is a manual for invention, a DIY spur for future workshops, courses, exhibitions, and essays—for new instruments and spatial devices both practical and imaginative, informed as much by speculative archaeology as by geological narratives of an Earth yet to come.
This is the challenge of worlds unrealized and the perceptual tools through which we’ll invent them: this is the world of landscape futures.
