The future is no longer the distant, mythical condition it once was to us. Technology has placed it at our fingertips, it wasn’t so long ago that we marveled at devices that could tell us where we were at that exact moment; it became odd when they recently began to tell us where we would soon be. The most important issue, however, might not be whether a future coproduced and made available to us by technology is good or bad, but rather how we want to relate to it as human beings. The three essays by Douglas Coupland collected in this volume address this question.

A key figure of Arte Povera, Mario Merz investigates and represents the processes of transformation of nature and human life: with in particular, the igloos, visually traceable to primordial habitations, become for the artist the archetype of inhabited places and of the world, as well as a metaphor for the various relationships between interior and exterior, between physical and conceptual space, between individuality and collectivity. These pieces are characterized by a metal structure coated in a great variety of common materials, such as clay, glass, stone, jute, and steel—often leaning or intertwined in an unstable fashion—and by the use of neon elements and wording.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition, Georges Robér Collages, Tekeningen en Monotypes at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 11 October–16 November 1969.

SM Cat. No 467.

Designed by Wim Crouwel.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition: Karlheinz Stockhausen & Mary Bauermeister–Elektronische Muziek–Schilderijen at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2–25 June, 1962; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 14 September–12 October, 1962; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, 2 November–3 December, 1962 and Groninger Museum, Groningen, 22 December–20 January, 1963

SM Cat. No 311.

Designed by Willem Sandberg.

Contributions by Manuela Ammer, Julie Ault, Monika Baer, Nairy Baghramian, Gerry Bibby, Jennifer Bornstein, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Dragana Bulut, Katarina Burin, Françoise Cactus, Leidy Churchman, Ann Cotten, Juan Davila, Dominic Eichler, Elmgreen & Dragset, Yusuf Etiman, Isa Genzken, Susanne Ghez, Margaret Harrison, Daniel Herleth, Annette Kelm, Janette Laverrière, Adam Linder, Lee Lozano, Charlie Le Mindu, Shahryar Nashat, Gina D’Orio, Stephen Prina, Dean Spade, Ming Wong.

The Jahresring series is one of the longest continually published annual journals for contemporary art in Germany. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions from visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Bringing together a discursive array of forms and timbres, it takes an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to exploring some contemporary cultural resonances with respect to gender and sexuality. In this sense, a “PS” or postscript might be understood as a place where relations or realities not explicitly stated in the main body of any given text, but nevertheless underpinning them, are revealed. A “PS” is a place of interpersonal agency; a compelling textual gesture that might add a “by the way” and an “also” and a “you know what we’re really talking about.” By its nature, a “PS” is contextualized and contextualizing. Though it may parade as the last word, it never is.

The Jahresring is published annually on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V.

James R. Murphy, a math teacher in La Guardia, New York, regarded mathematics as the most powerful and manipulable abstract language available to humans. To acquaint students who don’t “like” math with abstract and systematical thinking, he put a piece of string in their hands and taught them to make string figures.

How to spell the fight follows a thread that has been running through our fingers from centuries past till the present day, morphing from the tangible string figures that join our hands in childhood to the more elusive computational algorithms that engage our fingers today. Following this line of inquiry through various twists and turns, a conversation about collective agency emerges with the aim of rethinking current paradigms of cognition, education, and power.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist living in Berlin. Her research-based practice encompasses a variety of forms and formats, among them video, performance, installations, text, and sound. She tries to learn how to make string figures.

This is the fifth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional.