edited by Eric Kluitenberg – Book of Imaginary Media, excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium

edited by Eric Kluitenberg

book+dvd – debalie / NAi Publishers – ISBN 905662539X
From the oral tradition on, the power of communication was strictly connected to control, memory and imaginary. The latter was and still is the most powerful engine behind any new technology and device (physical or incorporeal) and the imaginary of media is also grounded on its immateriality. The ethereal transmission of content by signs, contrasts and colors variously combined is able to deeply touch our fantasies and create myths and separate worlds in our minds. So the collective use of media is able to generate a fictitious and autonomous soul, made out of socially projected desires. A restricted gotha of American and European theoreticians (the editor Eric Kluitenberg plus Siegfried Zielinski, Bruce Sterling, Erkki Huhtamo, Timothy Druckrey, Richard Barbrook and others) formalize here an historic summa of visionary ancestors of the so called new media, probing into history and recognizing recurrences of ideas. Tracing distinctive repeated events, like financial bubbles, or reconstructing phenomenon like Afrofuturism, the editor deals also with a subtle aspect of the relationship between time and information. Actually imaginary media embodies the power of infinite communication, taking over time and specific medium. The process of transmitting affects directly the information / communication life, so its immortality, obsessing even an eminent scientist like Edison and various other artists and experimenters in different historical periods. How to really transcends our body life to continuing our personal information processing and transmission activity is the last and at the same time older unanswered question. The enclosed dvd features a lecture/performance by Peter Blegvad and some beautiful cartoon / comics interpreting the subject. With such an array of contents and plenty of thumbnails examples from the past, this book is going to be a future classic in media studies.