Inventing Futures in Modern Media: Talk with Professor Gundolf S. Freyermuth
Inventing Futures in Modern Media: From Artistic Anticipation to Scientific Projection (and Back)
Professor Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Co-Founder of the Cologne Game Lab
April 7, 2022
12:15 – 1:15 pm
Please register for this Zoom event
Intersubjective hopes for the future have steadily accumulated since the beginning of the modern era in the West. These hopes are historically ‘new’ to the extent they are no longer oriented toward a religious afterlife, but toward better places and better times in this world. Over the centuries, secular utopian ideas have found aesthetic expression in a growing number of media—from the printed word to the comics, film, radio and television of the industrial age, to the digital games of today. Since the Enlightenment, the steady stream of artistic visions of imaginary and desirable futures—the mediated invention of the future—has corresponded with efforts at a theoretical-scientific exploration of what is to come or what might be possible. In this talk, Professor Gundolf S. Freyermuth will analyze the historical phases of the modern development of both artistic utopias and academic futurology, and will outline how innovative visions of the future and practices of its exploration are emerging anew in our digital age.