Still, the sweat is measurable. Western Europe just logged its warmest June since records began, and by late July, the EU had already burned through 434,976 hectares of wildfire - ahead of 2025, which was the worst year on record. Add Spain nudging 100 million tourists a year - roughly two for every resident - and "dog days" starts to feel generous.

But maybe there's something to learn from this. The name for the sweatiest weeks of the year comes, after all, from people looking up at the sky. Summer can also be a moment to look into other spaces - to travel through ideas, through orbit, through the past as we recollect it, through your own REM cycles - just as the eclipse will remind anyone standing in Spain on August 12th, when the Moon parks itself in front of the Sun for the first total eclipse over the peninsula since 1905. Escape or staycation: plenty of travel never involves a suitcase, and some of it can be done without leaving the sofa. Pack up nonetheless - we're going on a trip!

🏺 (Forcefully) Traveling Items Database of the Month

Yes, the name is a mouthful. But how else would you describe the UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects? Designed by architect Francis Kéré, it gathers 3D renderings of some 240 looted artifacts - objects that travelled, just not voluntarily. If you visit a museum this summer, consider it a useful companion: some of what you're looking at, and plenty of what's missing, is in here. It may also be the only museum that measures success by losing its collection - every repatriated object gets to leave.

🎞️ Time-Traveling Film of the Month

One of our favorite masterpieces of all all all time: La Jetée (1962), Chris Marker's 28-minute time travel story told almost entirely in still photographs - a film about moving through time in which nearly nothing moves. (One shot does. We won't say which.) Every rewatch refills it with meaning; Twelve Monkeys borrowed its whole skeleton. For those extra dog days when you want to cross dimensions from the comfort of your own, hopefully air-conditioned, home.

🛰️ Space-Traveling Ghost of the Month

Space Odradek, by Sangbong Lee, is about zombie satellites: machines that died decades ago but keep transmitting, drifting overhead like radio ghosts nobody thought to switch off. The name comes from Kafka's Odradek, the useless little creature that simply refuses to stop existing. Proof that even our junk travels further, and longer, than we do.

🎮 Traveling Game of the Month

Messenger is a free browser game in which you play a mail carrier on an alien planet small enough to lap on foot before your coffee cools. You hand-deliver other people's letters - among them, one a bald man receives from his past self, urging him to take care of his hair (too late) - while other players drift by, communicating strictly in emoji. A relaxing, well-crafted and aesthetically pleasing video-game world, it’s all the more remarkable that it’s an (entirely free!) browser game.

📻 Traveling Radio Station of the Month

OK, we didn't lie - we really are going on a trip. At the tail end of June, The Memory Radio Station opened at Palexpo in Geneva: a travelling radio station and exhibition we built with Lilly around Synthetic Memories, using generative AI to give visual form to memories that were never photographed, or have started to fade. Visitors share a memory, dedicate a song to it, and watch it take shape - part radio booth, part reminiscence therapy.

And starting September, the tour will resume. Keep your eyes peeled - are we coming to your city?

• Vienna - MuseumsQuartier - 2-6 September

• Berlin - Bikini Berlin - 17-22 September

• Cologne - Media Park - 25-29 September

• Firenze - Exact location TBD - 23-27 October

• Dublin - Exact location TBD - 27-31 October

• Brussels - Exact location TBD - 16-20 November

  As the exact dates & locations will get confirmed, we will update them on our events page on our website here…

💤 Traveling Through Your Subconscious

Dream Recorder, by Modem, is an open-source bedside device: wake up, say your dream out loud, and it plays it back as an ultra-low-definition cinematic reel - blurry on purpose, the way dreams actually survive the morning. No app, no notifications; you 3D-print the glow-in-the-dark shell yourself. Roughly six hours of travel a night, and you never leave the bed.

And just as this newsletter comes to a close, so does the studio - for two weeks only, don't worry. We'll be back at our desks the week of August 24th. Till then: make the most of your summer, whether it takes you across a border or just to the cold side of the pillow - and don't forget to lift your eyes now and then. The eclipse is on the 12th, Sirius rises just before dawn - and both are free.

- The sky is alight with a constellation of data and number 

From those who, finally, will take a two-week slumber xx