Shape of things to come

"This book - the largest on contemporary sculpture yet to appear - is itself an object. The sequence of nearly 700 pages creates, as its title, suggests, an artistic vision of the future. The novel by H.G. Wells, to which the title refers, envisioned events up to the twenty-second century and served both as a surprisingly accurate prophecy and a reflection of the author's own time. The book was a touchstone for Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which a great monolith stands as an iconic but enigmatic sculptured presence. This new book opens with an enormous standing monolithic styrofoam sculpture of a video cassette of 2001." "Unlike other contemporary art, the work of sculpture never simply represents a concept or a metaphor. It is an object, Meghan Daily describes in her introduction how the objects presented here are derived from every conceivable material and vary from abstract arrangements to re-configurations of everyday forms in magnificent transformation of the mundane, such as giant electric sockets, and ultimately to the recurring theme of the human body. Though the objects are laid out like mysterious archaeological artifacts, they suggest traces of future worlds as much as they reflect the weird substance of the present. They are presented as if the reader was, in fact, a visitor from another planet and the objects here displayed constitute the monumental evidence of our lives."--Jacket.