“Often in a cosmogram there’s an aim that goes beyond mere description or depiction: it’s often a redescription, in the conditional or future tense: not the world as it is but the world as it could be. There can be a utopian intention, the goal of projecting new possibilities into a world which seemed fixed. Or to use a recent example, Philip K. Dick’s novels map points where the standard ontology slips, where there are cracks in reality, out of which a new, more complete world can emerge.”

—John Tresch, Humanities Institute, University of Chicago

Cosmograms is conceived as an extension of Melik Ohanian’s film Seven Minutes Before (2004), a cinematic allegory of both the exhaustion of a certain narrative form and the new privilege accorded to space over time. Collecting twenty-three texts by authors from diverse fields of investigation and research, Cosmograms attempts to map the multiple coordinates of this new spatial paradigm. In his conversation with the editors, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk claims that “we are now living an epoch in which a more or less satisfied and luxurious conscience is learning the art of arranging its space. Modern man is a sort of ‘curator’ ... which is to say, an exhibition planner of the space that he himself inhabits. Every man has become a museum curator. We could say that installation art is the common meta-profession that everyone is obliged to practice. The innocence of the traditional habitat is lost for good.”