Book Launch + Talk: The Future is Not Lost by Matt Bluemink

Whatever happened to the world of the future? Join writer and philosopher Matt Bluemink for a presentation exploring the key ideas in his new book The Future is Not Lost On Music, Technology, and the Creation of New Worlds (Becoming Press, 2026), moderated by theorist Alessandro Sbordoni.

For more than a decade, Mark Fisher's concept of hauntology has shaped how we hear contemporary culture: as an endless loop of retro, revival, and nostalgia, haunted by futures that never arrived. But what if the future hasn’t disappeared? What if it has been playing all along – and we simply haven’t been listening?

Drawing on the music of artist like SOPHIE, Arca and Iglooghost, Matt Bluemink argues that the future is not lost; it still speaks to us through music.

Island-hopping through Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technics, Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation, and the spatial imaginaries of cyberpunk and solarpunk, Bluemink develops a new theoretical framework equal to the times – one that takes seriously our capacity to not only diagnose the world, but remake it. To create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture. The world of tomorrow is a blank canvas. New beginnings are always possible.

The presentation and discussion will be followed by a Q&A session.

Matt Bluemink is the editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths philosophy magazine. He is interested in the political and philosophical implications of technics, in particular the work of Deleuze, Stiegler, Sloterdijk, and Simondon. He also writes on contemporary music, urbanism, and digital culture. He is the author of The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology, and the Creation of New Worlds (Becoming Press, 2026). Alessandro Sbordoni is the author of Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Set Margins’, 2025), Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023; Becoming Press, 2024), and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.