What If: Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
What If: Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images
By (Author) Vilem Flusser
Translated by Anke Finger
Translated by Kenneth Kronenberg
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
25th August 2022
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Social forecasting, future studies
Philosophy
303.4901
Physical Properties
Hardback
120
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 25mm
Description
An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter
Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail. Vilm Flusser
Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher Vilm Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two scenarios for the future to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If is not just an impossible journey to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity.
Flussers disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flussers concept of design as crafty or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, good computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.
Reviews
"While the universe Flusser created with his previous book, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, explores a single alternate lifeworld coherent in its mirroring of the human species by a cephalopod, each scenario in What If suggests a variety of new ideas, given the speculative, projecting nature of their settingin the best and most creative sense of what ifin the past, the present, or the future."from the Introduction
Author Bio
Vilm Flusser (19201991) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column; and later moved to France. Minnesota has published a dozen of Flussers works in translation, among them Into the Universe of Technical Images, Does Writing Have a Future, Gestures, and VampyroteuthisInfernalis.
Anke Finger is professor of German studies and media studies at the University of Connecticut, where she also inaugurated the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative at the Humanities Institute. She is cofounder of the open access journal Flusser Studies and coauthor of Vilem Flusser: An Introduction (Minnesota, 2011).
Kenneth Kronenberg has been a translator for nearly thirty years, specializing in German intellectual and cultural history and diaries and letters. His recent translations include Jorun Poetterings Trade, Nation, and Religion and Fritz Trmpis Political Orchestras.
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American avant-garde poet and critic, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and founder of the UbuWeb online archive of experimental literary and visual art.
