Sham Ruins

Brian Willems is Associate Professor of Literature and Film Theory at the University of Split, Croatia. He is most recently the author of Speculative Realism and Science Fiction (2017) and Shooting the Moon (2015). He has curated exhibitions of new media art in Croatia and Slovenia and is the author of the novella Henry, Henry (2017).

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceChapter 1: Not Just RuinsChapter 2: The Potential of the PastChapter 3: Total ReplicationChapter 4: Ruins on Fire

"Contrary to the ruin that like a time capsule transmits a documentation of the present in the knowable past to a future that’s unknown and unknowing, sham obsolescence according to Willems, like precognition for PK Dick, invests the past and not the future withuncontrollability and otherness. The time to come – what’s new, what’s other – can come out of a faux past. The sham tear in your jeans is not nothing – and it’s neither allegory nor missing link. It is, Willems writes, a strategy for using objects in new and inventive ways. No surprise that Willems’s conspirators in this practical critique are artists and filmmakers."-Laurence Rickles, California Institute of the Arts, author of Critique of Fantasy"Why are we so fascinated with fakes, and especially with fakes that acknowledge their own fakeness? This fascination didn't begin with today's Elvis impersonators or knockoffs of Gucci bags. In this book, Brian Willems traces the cult of forged historical artifacts back to the 18th century, but he also shows how these weird objects reflect cultural anxieties that still perturb us today, in our current age of big data and big finance."- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University