The futures of writing : experiments in digital exscryption

We begin with Vilém Flusser’s concern that if we don’t engage in the interpretive, evaluative reading that has characterised the Humanities as we know them, we might as well leave all reading to artificial intelligences. We could then also give up writing (2011: 81). Yet elsewhere, he writes that ‘A fully enlightened consciousness no longer needs to be intelligent, to be about extracting meaning. It can concentrate on creative amalgamation. This transition from the old ways of reading to the new involves a leap from historical, evaluative, political consciousness into a consciousness that is cybernetic and playful, that confers meaning. This will be the consciousness that reads in the future’ (Flusser, 2011: 85). We’re interested in the tensions between these projections of a future, and in their implications for the practice of writing as well as reading.