All Possible Futures: Unrealized Archive uncovers “unrealized” graphic design projects that consumed many hours—sometimes years—of work, but were never produced. These fascinating proposals—ranging in form from PDFs to photos, dummies, models, and sketches—remain unmade but are deserving of serious discussion. Unlike in architecture and product design, where “unbuilt” or “speculative” work is forefronted as an important subject of critical discourse, most of these projects have until now been buried in flat files or deep in hard-drive storage. We are intrigued by the possibility of making innovative but unrealized graphic design concepts visible to the public and available for critical discussion. What would our discipline look like if unrealized work was treated as a legitimate area of inquiry? We will continue to collect such projects, publishing a new issue once a year, making this an ever-growing archive.
This exhibition is based on Issue 2 of the Unrealized Archive publication and conceptually acts as a supplement to the publication. Where as typically you have an exhibition that you base a publication on, in this case the relationship was inverted. This Exhibition visualizes a body of work that is largely immaterial and exists mainly as PDF proposals and sketches. In addition to acting as an aid to the publication, the exhibition also gave us the opportunity to expand on what was included in the book. For instance, we featured Dexter Sinister’s serverdial – a digital sundial a project made in response to the failure of White Night, the project featured in the publication.
