Stib’s Lab / Museum

The Museum of Near Futures

Every decade is handed a future it fully expects to receive. Most of them are never delivered. They get close — a prototype, a press release, a confident date — and then the world turns a corner without them.

This museum collects those futures. Not as failures, but as artifacts: each one is a precise record of what a moment believed it was about to become.

Now showing

The Last Human Button2029–2035One tactile button, kept from the last generation of interfaces that asked before acting. Visitors may press it. The archive disagrees with itself about what pressing it did.Enter →
The Hall of Almost1964–1974The AT&T Picturephone: a videophone that was demonstrated in 1964, sold in 1970, and forecast to reach a million sets by 1980. It reached about 453. Move through the surviving record — the room marks what it cannot verify.Enter →