Questa tempesta. Immaginazione digitale e tecnomagia incarnata

Abstract

The Storm. Digital Imagination and Embodied Technomagic.

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress”. So Walter Benjamin wrote about the flow of time – with space and identity, quoting James G. Ballard, “the three pillar of science fiction” (1996) – perhaps inspiring William Gibson about his Pattern Recognition, where the heroin, Cayce Pollard, says “The future is there [...] looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now”. This is our condition, a new human state in which a digital incarnation of technomagic imagination happens, how we see in another superb Gibson's work, The Peripheral, a dizzying narration of a possible future of ones. In my paper I’ll try to show how fiction squeezes this condition and the current, contradictory atmosphere in which our daily life is absorbed.