What is the new world order that we are feeling into?

The Shape of Now is a digital multimedia compilation featuring five creators who support creative independents for a living.

Together, we are mapping the contours of an emerging world order in 2026—one shaped by AI automation, social media fatigue, algorithmic frustration, screen burnout, post-pandemic spatial distance, and economic precarity.

This is a project in collective sense-making. We came together purposefully as a collaborative entity: co-designing our focus, co-curating the form, and co-authoring meaning.

We identified recurring themes across our lived experience including the dissolution of traditional career playbooks, the fear of irrelevance, the paradox of hyperconnectivity and isolation, the challenge of knowing how to chart your own way forward.

And then we made art about it.

The collection represents five distinct creative investigations of these conditions, each a reflection of our own subjective reality.

The work itself becomes a vehicle for data collection, pattern recognition, and cultural diagnosis. By building this structure together rather than in parallel, we hope to model the timeless beauty of coming together to ask big questions and make art as a response.

The Collection:

• 4-minute Work Week — Amelia Hruby (Lincoln, NE) • Spells for Getting Unstuck — Lexi Merritt (DC) • Devices for a Different Timeline — Callie Rojewski (Philadelphia) • Absurd Maps for Absurd Times — Xenia Viray (NYC) • Projections — Melissa Wong (Portland, OR)

Also included: A "Make Your Own Shape" Guide—a blueprint for replication. Gather your own group. Move through a parallel process of synthesizing shared fears and challenges about this emerging world order. Make art that metabolizes the feeling of living in this time.