Hybrid Futures: Dreams Rewired – A talk by Manu Luksch

Taking as a point of departure the montage film Dreams Rewired (Luksch, Reinhart, Tode, 2015) and its archival source material, which ranges from newsreels and scientific recordings to the first dramatic works, Luksch’s presentation will offer a historical perspective on urgent issues in current network and information politics. Such dominant modes of the contemporary as the striving for simultaneity and ubiquity, the enclosure of the media commons, the pursuit of efficiency in personal, domestic, corporate and public spheres – all were prefigured in the Electric Age, in the decades around 1900. The talk will employ visions from the Electric Age to illuminate specific present-day concerns, including the battle over ‘net neutrality’, the extension of state and corporate control to synthetic space via ‘smart’ homes and cities and the ‘Internet of Things’, aerial dominance through autonomous weapon systems, and the establishment of a regime of surveillance capitalism based on behavioural nudging. M