Anything that brackets NASA’s 1960 Langley Simulator, Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope, and Walt Disney’s Epcot deserves a second look.

Closed Worlds, the latest exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, assembles 41 experiments in autonomous, self-sustaining design, along with a 42nd contemporary project commissioned for the show. Though disparate in their goals, the experiments are united as radical, futurist propositions. To follow the evolution of self-contained systems is to trace a 100-year history of futurist propositions: a modified hot air balloon that reached the stratosphere in 1931, recent endeavors to preserve the Earth’s ecology within the Eden Project and Biosphere II, the ongoing attempt to make Masdar City the world’s most sustainable community.

Most of the Storefront’s wall space is occupied by one long, symbol-coded infographic. All 41 projects are arranged chronologically, each tagged with a black shape and colored lines. The shapes to designate project type (categories include autonomous houses, earth colonies, and ecotourism), while the colors specify which elements were self-sustaining within the project (like air, water, or biomass).  A box of pamphlets sits below each heading, offering two or three pages of descriptive images and text. Each visitor is implicitly asked to collect their favorites, compiling a personalized exhibition brochure. Or if you’re like me, you’ll take them all, double-fisting to hold your oversize pile.

Each project has a matching cylindrical poster, suspended from the ceiling. No doubt, these installations were conceived to echo the theme of self-containment: standing below 360 degrees of information is to be visually enclosed. To compel the viewer to seek the information contained within, the exteriors of the mobiles pose quixotic questions: can a house sustain itself by eating its own tail? Are fish reproductive in outer space? This gives the viewer permission to encounter the designs more organically, led by interest and chance rather than linear chronology.

Project 42 is the sole kinetic aspect of the exhibition. It consists of several suspended VR headsets, rotating along a closed loop. The industrial sound of the moving chain provides a fitting soundtrack to the show (many of the 41 designs were likely accompanied by steady noise from a generator or air circulation system). Viewers are meant to experience 3D images of the other 41 experiments, visually entering the closed systems. The VR wasn’t working when I visited, but the headsets were still rotating, and I tried one on. It’s unsettling, being pulled gently forward by the head. I imagine it’s even stranger—eerily
sci-fi—to see several people using the machines, pacing blindly in unison. But then, VR is the closed world of our future.

Closed Worlds will be on view through April 9th.