Slow Technology Reader: A Tool for Shaping Divergent Futures

The third book in Valiz's Slow Reader series, this time turning to technology and the futures it might open.

Carolyn F. Strauss edited it and opens it with an introduction, and it was made with Slow Research Lab as a successor to Slow Reader and Slow Spatial Reader. More than sixty contributors, working in art, scholarship and speculative practice, consider the digital systems now spreading around us, tools and methods that have lasted, and knowledge from beyond the West and beyond the human, drawing on Indigenous, feminist and queer thought, activism and ecology. Silvia Federici writes on how the body has been pictured as a machine, from the pump and the lever to the computer, and Jason Edward Lewis on workshops that bring Indigenous knowledge into AI; Kader Attia, Raven Chacon, Edwidge Danticat, Candice Hopkins, Suzanne Kite, Jaron Lanier and Mindy Seu are among the others.

The 35 chapters, most of them around ten pages long, can be taken in any order. Five themes set out at the start offer one route through them: scaffolding, spectres, rhythm, recalibration and trembling. Marks on the page edges, linking related chapters, offer another. Each page leaves room for the reader's own notes. Design by Haller Brun.

Valiz, 2025. 480 pages, paperback, 16 x 21 cm. In English.