FUTURES PAST

Since its brutal foundation myth, the story of Prometheus who steals fire from Zeus, gives it to humankind, thus turning them into something different from animals, and is perpetually ravaged by an eagle as punishment, technical knowledge has been about crossing boundaries of right and wrong, human, superhuman and subhuman, as well as temporal dimensions.Prometheus eponymously knows what lies ahead; technology is about artfully producing something that did not exist before and thus, in a sense, changing the future.Each one of these three beautifully produced collective volumes is focused on an aspect of ancient Greek and Roman technical knowledge.The first one (henceforth Animation) takes as its main theme artfully and artificially created imitation of life.It ranges from Homer (R. Bielfeldt) to philosophy, particularly Aristotle and his work on the motion of animals (R. Seaford, J.