[ExI] Futurist centenary coming up

[Stefano Vaj]

I find from another mailing list that Bruce Sterling is publishing on his
blog English translations of Futurist manifestos. See the original one here:
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/11/futurist-centen.html and the
Manifesto of Futurist women here:
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/11/the-manifesto-1.html.

This is a good thing, IMHO, because I believe  that Italian Futurism (but I
should simply say Futurism, given that the first Manifesto was firstly
published in France, and it quickly raised a deep international echo across
the entire political board, to the point that Lenin himself stated that in
his view Marinetti was the only true revolutionary in Italy), in tis
opposition to all kinds of cultural and biological conservatism, has a
fundamental importance in the genealogy of transhumanism.

While the same ideas have later emerged again and again, Futurism in fact
represents the original convergence amongst the growing nineteenth-century,
post-christian idea that the human status could and should be overcome; the
identification of technoscience as both the means and the reason to do that,
in the framework of a new epic and civilisational adventure on the scale of
hominisation itself, willingly embracing what modernity was already
promising; and a view of art and poetry as the process governing the very
possibility of a meaningful posthuman change.

Stefano Vaj
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