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Virtual Futures (Book)
The main Virtual Futures volume, collecting cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, posthuman speculation, and technocultural theory into one para-academic reference point.
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Core idea
The book's central claim is that futurity is not exhausted by either utopian liberation or technophobic alarm. Instead, it presents the future as a contested field in which synthetic environments, posthuman pragmatics, and human-machine intimacy are already reshaping the present.
As an edited volume, it works by juxtaposition. Different contributors and disciplines are made to resonate inside one frame, so the book performs the same cross-disciplinary assembly that the events themselves staged in public.
This matters because Virtual Futures was one of the main relay points between conference culture, publishing, and the wider circulation of CCRU-adjacent thought. The book captures the para-academic scene as a portable object.
How to read this text
Start with the opening framing material and contents page, then move to the chapters that match your route through cyberfeminism, posthumanism, or materialist technoculture.
Read it as a scene-document as well as a collection of arguments. The editorial frame and chapter adjacency are part of what the book is doing.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture, and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc, and Manuel de Landa (to name a few).
Definition · paragraph 1
VIRTUAL FUTURES Virtual Futures explores the idea that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia.
Definition · paragraph 4
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Virtual futures / edited by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J, Cassidy. p. cm. 1. Technology—Social aspects.
Definition · paragraph 1
Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture, and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc, and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the rise of post-human pragmatism.
Definition · paragraph 21
With Eric J.Cassidy, she organized the first “Virtual Futures” conference. She was editor of Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious, and is currently working on two books, one on Deleuze’s philosophy of science, and one entitled Time, Consciousness and Scientific Explanation.
Appears in sections
Virtual Futures and Para-Academia Primary section
Events, workshops, and off-campus method as the CCRU moved from campus structure toward para-academic circulation.