On Friday 9 October 2020, at approximately 7.20pm Singapore time, Remote Practices closed with a roundtable discussion over the virtual medium. The occasion marked the end of a fully online conference held over two days, featuring presentations and conversations from junior and senior academics, as well as designers. Conversing across five different time zones, key participants of the conference - Paul Emmons, C.J. Lim, Joan Ockman, Jane Rendell, Philip Ursprung, Naomi Stead, Lilian Chee, and Matthew Mindrup - engaged in critical reflections on remote practices. Much can be said in wrapping up a book that begins in intra-architectural anxieties and ends in extra-architectural possibilities, but it is only appropriate to begin in the same way as that which this conclusion attempts to reconfigure - that is, the spirit of reflexivity which defined the mood of the conference's closing roundtable.

There is irony in the textual translation of a verbal conversation occurring almost ten months ago for a conference on remoteness, conducted online across irreconcilable time zones. Inevitably, the passing of time has wedged a distance between one's present vantage point and the immediacy of speech one submitted to then..Fortifying this remoteness further, the global COVID-19 situation is still holding its own. Much to the dismay of many worldwide, the welcomed vaccine has not fully quelled anxieties of disease and collapse. Since Remote Practices, there was a resurgence of the pandemic in the United States and the United Kingdom in the last weeks of 2020. The virus mutated again and ravaged India at the beginning of April 2021. Threats of new variants continue to befuddle multinational efforts to contain its spread and the resultant casualties. We can now confidently say that looking back at Remote Practices, we very much were - and still are - amidst events that have not yet unfolded to completion.