Product details
- ISBN 9781350626294
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In an age of rising holograms, virtual realities, metaverses, and artificial intelligence, it has become increasingly essential to trace the long-winding, multi-dimensional histories of illusion that have emerged over time across the world.
Illusion Chamber studies seventeen iterations of illusion: dream, nightmare, mirage, hallucination, fantasy, figment, spell, simulation, story, vision, rumor, superstition, miracle, game, lie, conspiracy, and multiverse. In each chamber, over forty authors coalesce their insights into our experience of the unreal and the imaginary in far-ranging passages that cover subjects from the manuals of ancient alchemical circles to the prophetic episodes of medieval mystics, narcotized poets to horror filmmakers, and documented instances of mass hysteria to the folklore of shape-shifting.
The diverse thinkers who have contributed to this edited volume – collaborating from across Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East – form the control room at the epicenter of a question: What is the future of the illusion, and do we need a new philosophy of the impossible? The examples and case studies used to solve this riddle are drawn from the outer boundaries of different eras, geocultural landscapes, genres, and mediums: mythology, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, film, visual art, music, theater, dance, architecture, design, technological devices, video games, underground movements, urban legends, strange objects, ecological phenomena, biogenetic innovations, and experiments with the nature of consciousness.
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College, USA. His work tracks movements of radical thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including two volumes titled Omnicide I and Omnicide II on madness, and two volumes on night titled Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark and Night II: A Philosophy of the Last World. He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program, Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for The New Centre for Research & Practice, USA.
Ishita Jain is a scholar, consulting architect, and artist based in India working across areas of theatrical-cinematic formalism, theory fiction and spatial writing, and futurist world-building. She is the Director of the Living Midnight Narrative Outfit, India, a Fellow at the Institute of Postnatural Studies, Spain, and a Researcher in Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Research & Practice, USA. She lives in the lower Himalayas of the Kangra Valley and creates situations, encounters, and narratives entangled with transmedial storytelling. Current projects include the forthcoming book The Land of Time: Theory-Fictioning the Himalayan Mythosphere and the art installation titled The Raft of Illusions for the Bosch Parade Exhibition.
