The "Flipbook" States of Technology: Cultural Gestations and Future Revolutions
The Flipbook of Today. AI art Introduction Great inventions rarely appear overnight. More often, they pass through a period of incubation, during which preliminary techniques or embryonic devices announce what is to come. Like in pregnancy, humanity experiences cultural “labor pains” before giving birth to a new technological era. A child turning the pages of a folioscope and laughing at a dog that seems to walk cannot imagine that he is handling the seed of cinema. In the same way, someone using Word’s predictive text or Google’s search suggestions twenty years ago could not have foreseen that this simple principle would eventually underpin today’s LLMs. This essay examines such early moments—cinema, artificial intelligence, the printing press—frames them within a broader theoretical perspective, and asks: what are the flipbooks of our own time? From Flipbook to Cinema: The Seed of Movement The flipbook, or “thumb cinema,” is a humble toy: a stack of drawings that, when flipped ...
