ISBN The Age of Earthquakes

The Age of Earthquakes

A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era.

50 years after Marshall McLuhan’s ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Massage, Basar, Coupland and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that’s redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the ‘extreme present’.
 
THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and ‘mindsource’ images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly’s striking graphic design  imports  the  surreal,  juxtaposed,  mashed  mannerisms  of screen to page. It’s like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.
 
Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn’t just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it’s also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket. 

30+  artists  contributions: With  contributions  from  Farah Al Qasimi, Ed Atkins, Alessandro Bavo, Gabriele Basilico, Josh Bitelli, James Bridle, Cao Fei, Alex Mackin Dolan, Thomas Dozol, Constant Dullaart, Cecile B Evans, Rami Farook, Hans-Peter Feldmann, GCC, K-Hole, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eloise Hawser, Camille Henrot, Hu Fang, K-Hole, Koo Jeong-A, Katja Novitskova, Lara Ogel, Trevor Paglen, Yuri Patterson, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Taryn Simon, Hito Steyerl, Michael Stipe, Rosemarie Trockel, Amalia Ulman, David Weir, Trevor Yeung.


About author(s)
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian visual artist, writer, and designer. His first novel was the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He has published 14 novels, two collections of short stories, eight nonfiction books, and a number of dramatic and comedic works for stage, film, and TV. In 2014, Coupland had his first major solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, after which the show toured to Toronto, and then internationally. His book Kitten Clone was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Coupland is a contributor to the New York Times, e-flux journal, Artsy, and Vice online, and is a columnist with the Financial Times of London. Since 2015 he has been artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.