CABLE GUY.(The Talk of the Town)

Passersby negotiating Columbus Circle during the next few weeks will be unable to help noticing an enormous square box floating in the lofty lobby of the Time Warner Center, lit from within like a Japanese lantern and looming disconcertingly over the escalators that descend to Whole Foods. This is Time Warner's Home to the Future, an installation contrived to showcase the cable company's up-to-the-moment-and-beyond offerings for digitally enhanced living. In the future that is promised by Time Warner's perplexingly prepositioned Home to the Future, kitchens will be equipped with laptops for looking up recipes; family rooms will have streaming media that everyone, not just the adolescents in the family, will know how to turn on; and the TV in the bedroom will be tuned, a substantial amount of the time, to the karaoke channel.

The Home to the Future is the creation of Edwin Schlossberg, who the other day was at the Time Warner Center checking on his brainchild's progress in advance of its official opening. He explained that the installation, which is made from an aluminum truss and scrims of open-weave fabric upon which light can be projected, was "a very New York kind of thing. It's layered, and has eye-catching jewels in it, just as when you look down here"--he gestured toward Fifty-ninth Street--"you see the layers of things, until a traffic light stops your eye." Whether anything inside the Time Warner Center can rightly be referred to as a very New York kind of thing--it seems a mere accident of geography that the building itself is not being heralded as a very Houston or a very Atlanta kind of thing--Schlossberg himself falls into that category. As well as being a creator of high-end signage, he is an artist (he does things with Plexiglas) and an author of books (including one entitled "Interactive Excellence: Defining and Developing New Standards for the Twenty-first Century," and one called "Einstein and ...