Bookfuturism Visions of the Future Book Janneke Adema

Bookfuturism: Visions of the Future Book Janneke Adema Coventry University

Visions of the Book to Come • Mapping future visions of the book through time • Focus on the discursive-materiality of the book to come • Rethinking the hegemonic framework through speculative interventions

Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. But nor are they reducible to one another. The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither is articulated/articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. (Barad, 2008: 822)

The death of the book • 500 -year old meme • Reactions to media change • Fahrenheit 451 See: Leah Price ‘Dead Again’ (2012); Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital-Print (2012)

The Universal Library • Library of Alexandria • Library of Babel (Borges) • The Universal Digital Library (Kelly) • Canned Libraries • The Mundaneum • Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s Royal Library • Stanislaw Lem (Optons and Lectons) • Memex & microfilms

Multimodal Books • Audiobooks, Podcasts, Filmbooks • Paul Otlet (Televised Books) • Stanislaw Lem (Lectons) • Augmented books

The Social Book • Annotations, social reading, hypertexts, hyperlinking • Distributed authorship, wikibooks, collaborative editing

The Open Book • Versioning, serial publishing, iterations • Digitisation and access (no barriers) • No more copyright and unlimited R/W access (Kevin Kelly/Robert Darnton/Open Access movement) • Remixed books

Posthuman Books • • Machinic Writing Flarf/Google Poetry The Xenotext (Bök) Fahrenheit 451

Post-Digital Books • • Off-line Activism Luxury Items Artist Books & Design Self-Publishing & Hipster Publishing

Hegemonic Framework • • • Binaries Teleological Object-based Fixed, bound, static, container, storage Authors, readers, publishers and libraries Simplistic ideas of time/history and the now • Representational

Towards a New Speculative Framework Rachel Malik: ‘Horizons of the Publishable’ Johanna Drucker: ‘Conditional Documents’ Katherine Hayles: ‘Compression, Expansion and Apparatuses of Control’