Found: Museum exhibit about life in 2008

In 2096, The Smithsonian shows what life was like way back at the dawn of the networked era

One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at Wired magazine was the monthly back-page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e., the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers, illustrators, and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print—which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.

This piece from May of 2008 is a perfect example of how these pages often didn’t work when they were shrunk down to web resolution. I wanted to do a Smithsonian exhibit from the year 2096, based on my own memory of some crude mannequins in prehistoric garb that I saw in a natural history museum when I was a kid. The joke is that from museum visitors’ post-Singularity vantage point, the tech and culture of 2008 would seem as primitive and strange to them as neolithic tools and clothing would have seemed to my younger self.

The artists, designers, and photographer did a magnificent job of building the exhibit space. I particularly liked the subtle detail that instead of a glass barrier or velvet-rope stanchions, there was some sort of invisible force field separating patrons from the exhibit.
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I was proud of how the text I wrote gave a glimpse at what life was like at the end of the 21st century—even though it’s ostensibly explaining what life was like at the beginning of the 21st century. But all of that text is utterly illegible in the online version of the piece on the Wired site. (I think I also wrote funny futuristic explainers for a laptop and a Wii game console, but there wasn’t room in the layout for that.)

Here are some detailed slices of the page, followed by the complete text. Photo by Erik Pawassar, styling by Viktoria Ruchkan/Workgroup.

INSTALLATION TITLE:​
Smithsonian Institution
Dawn of the Networked Era
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​ONSCREEN TEXT​
Smithsonian Institution

250TH ANNIVERSARY 1846-2096

LIFE AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM

PURCHASERS OF THE GUIDED NEUROTOUR: Visualize the number 8 to read the thoughts of these denizens of the early 21st century.

Television Set
Screens that displayed video imagery were a focal point of the home. (Retina chips were still unheard-of.) The size of one's 'TV' screen reflected socioeconomic status.

NEWSPAPER
Many citizens still relied on "journalists" to gather and prioritize information, which was distributed every 24 hours on thin sheets of wood pulp.

MOBILE PHONE
In addition to facilitating verbal communication, the cellular phone granted access to a primitive version of CoreMind. It could function for only a few hours between "charges."
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​INSTALLATION TITLE:​
Prelude to the Singularity