Media Futures: Theory and Aesthetics

Description

This book deals with the connection between media and the future. It is about the imagination of futuristic media and what this says about the present, but it also shows how media are imagined as means to control the future. The book begins by describing different theories of the evolution of media and by exploring how this evolution is tied to expectations regarding the future. The authors discuss the theories of imagination and how the imagination of media futures operates. To do so, they analyse four concrete examples: the imaginations once related to interactive television and how they were performed in an important piece of media art; those on “ubiquitous computing,” which remain present today; those on three-dimensional, especially holographic, displays that are prevalent everywhere in cinema, and lastly the contemporary imaginations on quantum computing and how they have been enacted in science fiction. The book appeals to readers interested in the question of how our present imagines its technological futures. Acknowledgments Contents About the Authors List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction References Chapter 2: Media Change as a Cultural Phenomenon 2.1 Future Media: Five Theses 2.2 Media Change as a Solution to a Problem 2.3 The Desire for “New Media” in the Early 1990s 2.4 Piazza virtuale: Interactive Television as a New Medium References Chapter 3: Imagination and Future Media 3.1 Imagination and the Forms of the Imaginary 3.2 Concepts for Imagining Future Media 3.3 Disseminating New Media as Future Media 3.4 “Premediation”: Future Media as Media of the Future References Chapter 4: Futures of Digital Media 4.1 Interactive Television; or, Was Piazza virtuale a Social Medium? 4.2 Ubiquitous Computing: Omnipresent Computers as Media of “Embodied Virtuality” 4.3 The “Minority Report” Paradigm: Holographic Interfaces as Diegetic Objects 4.4 Cixin Liu and the Three-Body Problem: Quantum Computers as Postdigital Media? References Chapter 5: Future Media: Radical Imagination and “Immutable Futures” References Index