Notes
Introduction
Vilém Flusser, “Science Fiction,” orig. pub. March 20, 1989, Flusser Studies 20 (December 2015), https://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/hanff-science-fiction.pdf. All translations from the German by Anke Finger.
Bruce Sterling, “Slipstream,” 1989, https://www.journalscape.com/jlundberg/page2.
Anke Finger, “Introduction: Vilém Flusser’s Atlases,” in Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, by Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxiii.
Finger, 116.
Daniel Irrgang, “Die Briefe zwischen Vilém Flusser und Felix Philipp Ingold, 1981–1990,” Flusser Studies 20 (December 2015): 1–25, https://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/briefe-zwischen-flusser-und-ingold.pdf.
Irrgang, 20.
Felix Philipp Ingold, “Vilém Flusser prophezeite den Niedergang der Schriftkultur und des Fernsehens: Und er sah Figuren wie Trump kommen—eine Würdigung des Denkers,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 25, 2018, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-technologie-bringt-keinen-ewigen-frieden-sie-schickt-uns-in-den-ruhestand-ld.1430761?reduced=true.
Ingold.
Petra Gropp, Szenen der Schrift: Medienästhetische Reflexionen in der literarischen Avantgarde nach 1945 (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2006), 276.
For an excellent discussion of scenario planning and “scenario thinking” at the intersection of art and technology, see Theo Reeves-Evison, “The Art of Disciplined Imagination: Predictions, Scenarios, and Other Speculative Infrastructures,” Critical Inquiry 47 (Summer 2021): 719–46.
Heiko Christians, Crux Scenica: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Szene von Aischylos bis YouTube (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2016), 248.
Christians, 250.
Text mining accomplished by Jonathan Ampiaw, Clarissa Ceglio, Natalie Granados, Tom Lee, Wenchao Lou, Catherine Masud, Sara Sikes, Cameron Slocum and Carly Wanner-Hyde.
Marek Oziewicz, “Speculative Fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, March 29, 2017, https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-78.
See Anke Finger, “Design/Shape,” in Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, ed. Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Miller, and Rodrigo Martini (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 23–29.
Jill Lepore brought back into the limelight just such a project, albeit referring to historical fact from the 1960s: “a computer program designed to predict and manipulate human behavior, all sorts of human behavior, from buying a dishwasher to countering an insurgency to casting a vote. They called it the People Machine. Hardly anyone, almost no one, remembers Simulmatics anymore. But beneath that honeycombed dome, the scientists of this long-vanished American corporation helped build the machine in which humanity would, by the twenty-first century, find itself trapped and tormented: stripped bare, driven to distraction, deprived of its senses, interrupted, exploited, directed, connected and disconnected, bought and sold, alienated and coerced, confused, misinformed, and even governed. They never meant to hurt anyone.” Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (New York: Liveright, 2020), 2.
Victoria de Zwaan, “Slipstream,” in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124.
Economic Miracle
“Wirtschaftswunder” is the original German title for this scenario. Wirt refers to host; Wirtschaft refers to both economy and tavern or pub—here, it also refers in a wider sense to a hosting entity, to being a host. Wirtschaftswunder itself, an economic miracle, also refers to the burgeoning post–World War II economy in West Germany. —Trans.
Adult tapeworm. —Trans.
“Pecunia non olet”: money does not stink. —Trans.
“Love moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradise 33). Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy. —Trans.
Agriculture
Anhalt-Lippe refers to the German Principality of Lippe (1123–1918) and the Duchy of Anhalt (1806–1918). —Trans.
Flusser here is playing with Kunst (art) and künstlich (artificial). —Trans.
Chemical Industry
Lesen means to read; auflesen means to gather; Aufgelesenes means that which has been gathered or is finished being read. —Trans.
Perpetual Peace
Ruhestand refers to both a resting state and retirement. —Trans.
Black Is Beautiful
This scenario is connected to Osvaldo de Andrade’s decolonizing “Manifesto Antropófago” [Cannibalist manifesto] from 1928, a text of great importance to Flusser. https://www.sduk.us/2011/andrade_manifesto.pdf.—Trans.
A Breather
The German Einbildungsprogrammierer refers to Flusser’s complex term Einbildung, usually translated as “imagination”; but the ein and Bild also refer to impression, to the process of creating an image, so the word compound here also includes programmer of images that have been imprinted. —Trans.
Afterword
Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time (New York: Harper/Collins, 2016), 102–3.
Goldsmith, 102–3.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3, October 5, 2020.