Memories of the Future

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).

"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

• 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.