The Age of Earthquakes
  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141979564
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00
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The Age of Earthquakes

A Guide to the Extreme Present

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Mar 2015
EBook
5 Mar 2015
Paperback
22 Apr 2015
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A unique artistic and literary collaboration of images, ideas and slogans, on how the internet has changed us

Human experience - love, money, belief, progress, politics, time - doesn't look or feel the way it used to. Wonder why? Because you are the last generation that will die.

A unique collaboration between three people, The Age of Earthquakes tours the world that's left behind as the world we knew melts away. A book of perceptions set in our 'extreme present', it's a new history of the world, a portrait of our digital era in a relentlessly paper form. Because we haven't just changed our brains these past few years. We've changed the structure of the planet.
  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141979564
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:
Share…

About the authors

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland (pronounced KOHP-lend) (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian writer, designer and visual artist. His first novel was the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Since then, Coupland has written twelve more novels, which have been published in most languages. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for the Financial Times. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, e-flux, Dis and Vice. In 2000, after a decade of generating web graphics, Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives: 'Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything' at the Royal Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; and 'Bit Rot' at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam and Villa Stuck in Munich. In 2015 and 2016, Coupland was an artist-in-residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute.

portrait photo of Douglas Coupland

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and critic. Since 2006 he has been Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Praise for The Age of Earthquakes

Brainy book that will rock your world

Evening Standard

Absolutely amazing

Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

An email-like, culturally-perceptive exploration of our digital realities... a mix between a dystopian modern glossary, Internet memes, multiple-choice dropdowns, mindsourced images and a fair bit of wisdom, it is a self-help book for the "last generation that will die"

AnOther Magazine

A philosophical Anarchist Cookbook for the online era, when we are in touch with everyone at once all the time, or like to feel that we are... Like Marshall McLuhan's iconic dictum "the medium is the message" or the staccato bursts of meaning of George W.S. Trow's essay-book In the Context of No Context, The Age of Earthquakes is an abstract representation of how we feel now about how we are now. It's a book insistently engaged with the present tense... Perhaps it is the 21st century's first book-meme

Pacific Standard

Many of us feel like technologies of the future are arriving too slowly, but a new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book suggests that, in fact, it's dawning on us faster than we ever thought possible

Vice

A pocket-sized primer on our blossoming obsolescence

Kate Sutton, Art Forum

Age of Earthquakes = panic-inducingly addictive

Penny Martin, editor of The Gentlewoman

It's a fun, visual and easy read. Verdict: In the future all books will be written this way

Sultan Saood Al Qassimi

An abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world

Hello!

I don't know about you but I would very much like a guide to this brave new world

Huck

Addictive... A fun read. But one that makes you question how you read, why you read and just how much the internet has restructured our brains... It is a book not only inspired by the internet, but seemingly written by the internet. It is as if the internet gained not only artificial self-consciousness but wisdom - and then became your pal

Tod Wodicka, National

I think everyone should read it

Mike Pinnington, Double Negative

The Age of Earthquakes seeks to induce paradoxical visions of the contemporary, both ambivalent and critical

V Magazine