Cabinet 13

We have been living through boom times for the future. Even during the relative calm before the escalating storms of 2001, our cultures and industries collaborated in a remarkable proliferation of words and images about this impossible entity, the future. In recent years, the very thought "future" has been spectacularized in extraordinary ways. Produced in coordination with Duke University Press's forthcoming book of the same title, this volume explores the ways in which "the future" is a placeholder for fantasies and anxieties very much connected to the present. Dan Rosenberg profiles Theodor Holm Nelson, inventor of hypertext; Joseph Masco investigates the "desert Modernism" of the Nevada Test Site and Liberace's Las Vegas; and "The Japanese Futurist Manifesto," written in 1928, is published for the first time in English. Also in this issue, Ben Marcus on the color "Khaki," David Levi Strauss on Leon Golub's photographic archive, a history of paint-by-numbers, a CD compilation of historical political speeches including Woodrow Wilson's address to the American Indian, and more.