My co-translation of Vilém Flusser’s What If? Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images (U of Minnesota Press) is available for interactive reading.
What If? goes digital: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/flusser-what-if is now an online and interactive ebook on the University of Minnesota Press Manifold platform. Check out the Resources section with scenario visualizations from the Greenhouse Studios team – and add your own: https://manifold.umn.edu/…/call-for-images-visualizing…
Here’s a short description of the text:
An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter
Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future.” What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction and serves as both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.
While the universe Flusser created with his previous book, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, explores a single alternate lifeworld coherent in its mirroring of the human species by a cephalopod, each scenario in What If? suggests a variety of new ideas, given the speculative, projecting nature of their setting—in the best and most creative sense of ‘what if’—in the past, the present, or the future.
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from the Introduction
Professor of German Studies / Media Studies / Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Director, Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities and Media Studies
Co-Chair, German Studies
