Teoría general de la basura

This book begins by assuring that the first known voice recording is that of Walt Whitman reciting, in the year 1890, his poem America. Before that date, and with no sound records available, we have no idea what speech sounded like. If we were to hear today a Roman of the first century say rosae, perhaps we would hear something like the roar of a tiger or the sound of a machine. And it is that all things have their 'year zero line', the place beyond which we invent everything: fiction begins there. And this book ends up unfolding a whole alternative theory about what is an artistic product and what is a machine and an organism, thus producing new meanings to the concepts 'natural' and 'artificial'. In between, and along a path woven with a very personal network of metaphors that combine the poetic and the scientific, we will see things happen such as an aeronautical interpretation of the Benjaminian Angel of History, or the reason for the identity of the West -forged in the idea of the travel and in the construction of 'the other'-, or pages that will shed new light on contemporary arts -especially appropriationism-, or we will know what fragmentation and noise in communication mean today. From a New Order album to the horse that Nietzsche embraced in Turin, from the cinema of Chris Marker to Lady Gaga, from complex systems theories to the Sleepers of Ephesus, from the mythology of romanticism to the no less impossible pop mythology, or the why from the recent world economic collapse to the 'Higgs Boson Blues' that Nick Cave sang, everything comes in this book to redefine our daily lives. General Garbage Theory bases its principle on the fact that we do not elaborate arts and sciences through excellence but by using old garbage, the waste that others accidentally left us. A book that raises a very original ontology and epistemology of our contemporaneity: in the residues of our present are the cultural genes of the near future.