Future Writing: Editorial Introduction

This collection of eight contributions on the theme of “Future Writing” is inspired by an intermedia investigative project at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. Starting from a Derridean grammatological review of the act of writing today, authors were invited to consider writing-the-future along with the future-of-writing. This includes the ways in which science fiction and utopian texts, but also visionary programs for emerging technologies develop strategies of questioning the present by positing an ontologically discontinuous future. But future writing also has a past when romantic poets imagine a new language which allows us today to explore data-mining through the lens of copper-mining. The question is framed by our contemporary experience: Writing and the memory of the hand are becoming obsolete by way of typing and other technical proxies. These boundaries are challenged by Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality as providing new spaces for human articulation. At the same time, written characters are threatened by technical modernization, reminding us of issues of enactment and embodiment in the digital world.