Kathy Acker: Empire of the Senseless. A Novel (1988)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · appropriation, body, cyborg, gender, science fiction, sexuality
“Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. ‘An elegy for the world of our fathers,’ as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.” (from the back cover)
Publisher Grove Press, New York, 1988
ISBN 0802110797
227 pages
Commentary: Peter Wollen (London Review of Books, 1998).
PDF (18 MB, no OCR)
Comment (0)Echte Wagner Margarine, Album 3, Serie 12-13: Zukunftsfantasien (c1930)
Filed under artist publishing | Tags: · communication technology, science fiction, television, transport
This image comes from a set of collectible cards issued by the margarine factory Wagner & Co. in the northern German town of Elmshorn, circa 1930. The album is arranged in 36 series of 6 cards each; two of them (12-13) are titled “Zukunftsfantasien” [Fantasies about the Future]. The author of the cards is unknown.
The caption under the image reads: „Drahtloses Privattelefon und Fernseher. Jeder hat nun sein eigenes Sende- und Empfangsgerät und kann sich auf einer bestimmten Welle mit Bekannten und Verwandten unterhalten. Aber auch die Fernseh-Technik hat sich so vervollkommnet, daß man dem Freunde gleichzeitig ins Angesicht schauen kann. Sende- und Empfangsgerät sind nicht mehr an den Ort gebunden, sondern werden in einem Kasten von der Größe eines Photoapparates immer mitgeführt.“
Publisher Heinz Wagner / Holsteinsche Pflanzenbutterfabriken Wagner & Co., Elmshorn in Holstein, c1930
1 of 18 nonpaginated cardboard sheets
HT RidT
Low resolution JPGs (via)
View online (cards only, on Retro-Futurism.de)
Cards assembled into PDF (via)
Alondra Nelson (ed.): Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text (2002)
Filed under journal | Tags: · africa, afrofuturism, art, diaspora, internet, literature, music, poetry, posthuman, race, science fiction, subjectivity, technology
The issue guest edited and introduced by Alondra Nelson explores futurist themes, sci-fi imagery, and technological innovation in African diasporic culture. Contributors approach this under-explored theme from a variety of angles: as a novel frame of reference for visual culture; as fiction of the near-future; as poetry; as new forms of black subjectivity; as new narratives about the digital revolution; and as the imagining of future directions in African diasporic studies. Alexander G. Weheliye rethinks the category of the posthuman. Ron Eglash historicizes the nerd, while Anna Everett shows how the African diaspora prefigures the Internet. Kali Tal explores the utopian vision of black militant near-future fiction, whose heir apparent, Nalo Hopkinson, is interviewed by Alondra Nelson. The esthetic possibilities of this project are evident in poetry by Tracie Morris, and the images of Tana Hargest and Fatimah Tuggar.
Social Text 71, Summer 2002
146 pages
PDF (15 MB)
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