Living In The Future : Issue One - New Year, New You

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Rebecca Bligh

In 72, a piece of stone-cold sober psychedelia, Ben Osborn relates events occurring during the Wow! Signal, second by second, from both a mortal and a divine point of view.

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Viniita Neet Moran’s Collage shows us an arcane, windswept, mechanized, post-Romantic landscape whose putative authors seem recently to have left the scene.

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Pete Inkpen’s poem Ab+Ante describes the development and intentional spread of an empathy virus, begun at the the lectern and interwoven with the trajectory of its scientist-maker’s career.

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Marta Poznanski’s poem Another Stanza – Future Man is an address: at first, it seems, to the eponymous archetype; next, an acknowledgement of the new epistemes to and of which “Future Man” is the encephalous-vs-acephalous subject (i.e., they kept only the head); then , in reprise, a eulogic address made as if to one man.

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We Are Living the Sci-fi of Yesterday – in an interview with LITF, Ed Fornieles holds forth on the relative distributions of futurity in LA and London; the future of internet interactions, the importance of touch, and the natures of futurity and truth.

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In Future People (Perhaps) Paul Kindersley tentatively predicts a post-sexual post-humanity.

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In RPG, Jaakko Pallasvuo reflects with an acid-fuelled afternoon’s melancholia, on various(ly) mediated proximities and distances; predicting the further gamification of intimacies, entanglements of IRL and URL.

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In Play G Ad Minoliti installs highly sexed and affectionate beings of post-binary genders in abstract and arcadian centrefold spaces of artifice.

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Llew Watkins gives us the first installment of Hinterland Shift, an intensely REAL, intensely present piece of fiction. Earth, dew, kisses; a book, even, all these have a hyper-quiddity about them; and then we are made present to a familial gathering at which such strange things are happening – just which present real is this exactly?

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Joey Holder channels ConTEXT: a Delphic rumour of AI/growth. Plant, code, soft and wetware, and all of the feels, in conducive environs. Assistance required.

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Can we hack ourselves? What about simulate ourselves? In his Plurality of Worlds in Late-Capitalism, Jack Brennan takes on the computational oracular via Giordano Bruno, Renés Decartes, Alan Turing, the Club of Rome, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 TV film World on a Wire (Welt Am Draht).