Memories of the Future

What is a memory of the future? This book speculates on the connections between memory and futurity in a variety of fields, including counter-histories, women's studies, science fiction, art and design, technology, philosophy and politics. Topics include technology and fashion, reinventions of monetary exchange and memories of adolescence.

What is a memory of the future? Is it a myth, a fiction of a severed arm, a post-human debate or a broken time machine? In an increasingly insecure future-world there is an urgency to consider and debate these questions. Memories of the Future: On Countervision addresses these concerns by speculating on the connections between memory and futurity in fields such as counter-histories, women's studies, science fiction, art and design, technology, philosophy and politics. This book reveals how these subjects regenerate at the intersections of vision, counter-cultural production and the former present. The volume links the re-imaginings of memory into the present with topics such as the fever dream allegory of the adolescent social experience, soft technologies of future dress, reinventions of monetary exchange, rekindled subjectivities of school days, and technics and human progression. These countervisions argue against the homogenizing status quo of the present in order to challenge the customs, traditions and conventions of the past and propositions of the future.

Autorentext

Stephen Wilson is a writer and theorist on contemporary art; he is a senior lecturer and coordinator of postgraduate theory at University of the Arts, London. Deborah Jaffé is a cultural and design historian and the author of Ingenious Women: From Tincture of Saffron to Flying Machines (2003).

Zusammenfassung
«Everywhere the crisis speeds toward places and people that have long kept the disasters they produced far away and for others. Across a series of groundbreaking essays, Memories of the Future sets into play a debate among scholars and artists about the politics of the future present. This collection refuses to offer an answer. It instead provides what we need now, the current grammatical and semantic nature of art and politics today - when the coming future crisis was and for whom; ends whose beginnings are coming; and events that never quite happen.» - Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor, Columbia University «If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, what about those who fail to imagine the future? This volume bursts with insights into the history and contemporary practice of prediction, illuminating futurology as a politically charged dimension of intellectual history.» - Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar, Yale Center for British Art

Inhalt

CONTENTS: Deborah Jaffé: Preface - Stephen Wilson: Introduction - Malcolm Quinn: The Plot against the Future - Alberto Abruzzese (translated by Kevin W. Molin): Three Moves for a Single Advent/Event: (a) From Modern Fiction to the Latest Seriality; (b) Means instead of Ends; (c) The Revolt of Technics against Human Progress - Julia Eccleshare: Mortal Engines and The Hunger Games: How Myths from the Past Shape Visions of a Sustainable Future and the Responsibility for It as Represented in Children's Literature - Sarah Bonner: Girl Acting Out: Revisiting the Fairy Tale Futures of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White - Penny McCarthy: Mirror: Time Will Darken Paper - Jennet Thomas: School of Change: Re-dreaming Past Futures - Liam Sprod: The Blackening of Epekeina Tes Ousias: The Death of the Sun and the Death of Philosophy - Claudio Celis Bueno: The Attention Economy: From Cyber-Time to Cinematic Time - Austin Houldsworth: Counterfiction: Designing within Alternative Worlds - Ilaria Puri Purini: Seizing the Future: The Futurists and Future-oriented Contemporary Works - Anneke Smelik/Lianne Toussaint: From Hardware to Softwear: The Future Memories of Techno-Fashion - Karl Bell: (Un)knotting Time: Imagining Past Futures in Early Victorian Street Ballads.