Information Fantasies

Xiao Liu is assistant professor of East Asian studies at McGill University.

• ContentsIntroduction: “Information Pot” and Postsocialist Politics of Mediation1. Extrasensory Powers, Magic Waves, and Information Explosion: Imagining the Digital2. The Curious Case of a Robot Doctor: Rethinking Labor, Expert Systems, and the Interface3. The “Ultrastable System” and the New Cinema4. Affective Form: Advertising, Information Aesthetics, and Experimental Writing in the Market Economy5. Liminal Mediation and the Cinema RedefinedEpilogue: The Virtual Past(s) of the Future(s)AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats-forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories-to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium."-Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford "Liu solidly connects a very unique system with the IT perceptual revolution, essential for understanding the present futuristic scenario."-Neural"Information Fantasies strives to maintain a balance between the liberatory excitement around digital media and the constant crises of postsocialist precariousness (p. 10) and will surely prove a fundamental resource for an audience of readers as interdisciplinary as this volume’s author."-Asiascape"Information Fantasies shows that the close reading of signs, symptoms and systems need not be at odds with descriptions of materiality and technicity."-Critical Inquiry"An ambitious academic dream turned into reality. The book shows the author’s diligence in research and skills in organizing extensive and dispersive materials with a clear focus. . . . A valuable work in the study of communication and humanity."-China Review International"The site-specific and historically situated cases, along with brilliant interpretations, will interest researchers in media, literature, and modern China studies as well as historians of technology."-Technology and Culture