Future's Theory – serie

What are the most radical transformations on the horizon of our world? And how are they irreversibly altering our experience of time, movement, language, mind, body, virtuality, power, and nature?Cloaked in relative obscurity, future eras compel the invention of new techniques of visionary speculation. Future’s Theory provides many, shining a light on the infinity of possible futurities from multiple astonishing perspectives. Exploring how we imagine new ages in the 21st century, the book examines how alternate future dimensions will affect everything from our culture to our politics, our bodies to our minds.Filled with original work from over 20 prominent thinkers in the domains of literature, philosophy, visual art, architecture, design, media studies, ecology, anthropology, it features immersive entries on phenomena including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, mass migration, speed, climate, geo-engineering, and automation. Contemplating the variables that will expand and distort these fields, Future’s Theory opens up a new atmosphere for thought itself in the epochs to come.

What are the most radical transformations on the horizon of our world? And how are they irreversibly altering our experience of time, movement, language, mind, body, virtuality, power, and nature?Cloaked in relative obscurity, future eras compel the invention of new techniques of visionary speculation. Future’s Theory provides many, shining a light on the infinity of possible futurities from multiple astonishing perspectives. Exploring how we imagine new ages in the 21st century, the book examines how alternate future dimensions will affect everything from our culture to our politics, our bodies to our minds.Filled with original work from over 20 prominent thinkers in the domains of literature, philosophy, visual art, architecture, design, media studies, ecology, anthropology, it features immersive entries on phenomena including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, mass migration, speed, climate, geo-engineering, and automation. Contemplating the variables that will expand and distort these fields, Future’s Theory opens up a new atmosphere for thought itself in the epochs to come.

What colour is the future – or rather, what colors are the futures? Broad and enlightening in its coverage, this collection explores the notion that there is not just one visualization of the future, but many, stretching across and beyond shades of utopian brightness and dystopian darks. Visiting futures that belong to the realm of ghosts, it calls for a hauntology that deals not only with spectres of the past but also the of future, offering a fascinating engagement with both colonial history and hyper-accelerated societies.Guided by a diversity of colours, contributors speculate on non-anthropogenic futurities, theorising on the richness of an essentially complex and disordered material universe. The volume’s critical approaches range from speculative realism, oceanic biology, and philosophy and politics, to posthumanism and queer theory. What all these offerings have in common is a strong focus on materiality, the in|human, and the innovative possibilities that are brought into light by this ‘fabulated spectrum’. They combine the potentialities of philosophy, art, and science, in that they all forge a relation to chaos, or, an undeterminable ‘new.’ Powerful and thought-provoking, this book illuminates different possibilities of gazing upon futures in nuanced and novel ways.

In an age of rising holograms, virtual realities, metaverses, and artificial intelligence, it has become increasingly essential to trace the long-winding, multi-dimensional histories of illusion that have emerged over time across the world.Illusion Chamber studies seventeen iterations of illusion: dream, nightmare, mirage, hallucination, fantasy, figment, spell, simulation, story, vision, rumor, superstition, miracle, game, lie, conspiracy, and multiverse. In each chamber, over forty authors coalesce their insights into our experience of the unreal and the imaginary in far-ranging passages that cover subjects from the manuals of ancient alchemical circles to the prophetic episodes of medieval mystics, narcotized poets to horror filmmakers, and documented instances of mass hysteria to the folklore of shape-shifting.The diverse thinkers who have contributed to this edited volume – collaborating from across Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East – form the control room at the epicenter of a question: What is the future of the illusion, and do we need a new philosophy of the impossible? The examples and case studies used to solve this riddle are drawn from the outer boundaries of different eras, geocultural landscapes, genres, and mediums: mythology, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, film, visual art, music, theater, dance, architecture, design, technological devices, video games, underground movements, urban legends, strange objects, ecological phenomena, biogenetic innovations, and experiments with the nature of consciousness.