This book is about how imagination, technology and human desire are understood on the cusp of a new century - a century that is being defined in terms of the 'digital-age'. Far from subscribing to this general diagnosis, however, we argue that the intellectual restrictions of the digital paradigm are now becoming unavoidable, not least since it insists on the reduction of continuous reality into discrete binary units. Our position in this book demands that whilst the continuum of reality should not be sacrificed for the sake of conceptual convenience neither should we deny the significance of the digitisation of information. The term 'Postdigital' is intended to acknowledge the current state of technology whilst rejecting the implied conceptual shift of the 'digital revolution' - a shift apparently as abrupt as the 'on/off', 'zero/one' logic of the machines now pervading our daily lives. New conceptual models are required to describe the continuity between art, computing, philosophy and science that avoid binarism, determinism or reductionism. The very unpredictability and ambiguity of human experience - its most valuable features - are being reconciled in the binary codes of digital processing and the logical prescriptions of many scientists. These amputated descriptions expose the need for more flexible metaphors with which to describe the stable yet dynamic reality of the postdigital age. The metaphor we use in this book is that of a biological membrane, a lubricating sheath that gives form to complex phenomena (such as imagination, technology and desire) at the same time as enabling a continuity between them. The power of the membrane metaphor is its dual and contradictory function: like a transparent wall, it both connects and divides. If we are to talk about an environment that is both changing and staying the same, or things that are both separate and integrated, we need mental tools more subtle than exclusive, binary logic can supply. As a consequence, we insist that formal analysis of human culture is inadequate. Cutting up the data ever more finely, we assert, will only obscure the thickness of the membrane by reducing it to a thin film that will, at best, merely reflect the kind of scalpel used and, at worst, reiterate current intellectual vogues. In its place, we claim that the membrane must be described through both analysis and sensation, and that this description must never be confused with explanation. However the reader chooses to approach this book - sequentially, rhapsodically, with antagonism or generosity - the authors hope its reception will expose the necessity for a new kind of diverse order. The impulse for us to collaborate on this book arose from independent research that we both conducted in the 1990s along parallel tracks. These resulted in two monographs, which were quite specific to the decade, and appeared to demand reconciliation. In 1995 Robert Pepperell published The Post-Human Condition. This was a polemical manifesto that discussed how we saw ourselves, and the world, in light of the recent dramatic increase in co-operation between humans and technology. One prominent thesis of this book was that reality, which was formerly understood as the counterpoint of imagination, was increasingly seen as continuous with it. Accounting for this, he argued that machines which were thought to replicate human intelligence, whilst grounded in a dubious logic, did indeed shift the perception of what it meant to be human. At the same time Michael Punt was conducting research into nineteenth century technology (in particular the Cinématographe) in order to answer a number of fundamental questions about the processes of invention and technological innovation. Punt's conclusions, published in Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary were that doctrinaire histories of technology were asymmetrical in that they failed to factor in the users as active interpreters of technology - users who were able to change the meaning of an invention through a process of mutual intelligibility. As a consequence, histories of technology could not account for the discrepancy between what inventors thought they were doing and what they apparently achieved. Extrapolating from this insight with case studies from the late twentieth century, it became evident that to understand the effects of the human-system collaboration (which Pepperell had posited) it was necessary to re-think what being human meant. As common ground emerged between the two studies, the subtitle quickly declared itself - imagination, technology and desire. This uncertain triad stands in contrast to the robust triad of social, economic and technological explanations of historical change. The author's scepticism about such determinism is founded on a belief in the importance of the body, and the inherent failure of our attempts to fully satisfy its desires. Crucial amongst all desires is the need to extract order from incoherent experience. One observable symptom of this condition, we argue, is that historical change is often seen as essentially linear with abrupt punctuation, whereas, in reality, transitions between states are attenuated and messy, and can only be accounted for with hindsight. Punt's case study of the emergence of the cinema noted the contrast between 'goal-driven' histories of invention as a relay race toward realism - moving pictures, sound, colour - and the archival evidence showing that these technological possibilities existed well before the cinema was instantaneously 'invented'. Factoring in the user's imagination and desire into technological change, however, helped us to understand why a particular entertainment form emerged when it did. The view of historical change that both Pepperell's and Punt's work advocated was not posited on cause and effect, nor was it dialectical. Instead a 'messier' model was necessary in which contradictory forces were neither resolved, nor neutralised. They simply co-existed as identifiable floating forces, accommodating and generating human desire. The task of the cultural analyst and the historian in explaining historical change is to track as much of the visible network of forces as possible, and evaluate their relative determining power in relation to verifiable outcomes. In this methodology, the best the analyst and historian can hope to achieve is a useful description of the 'mess' - never a conclusive explanation of the moment. It was this shared idea of how things change, and have changed, that shaped the title 'The Postdigital Membrane' and determined the rhetorical strategy of the thesis. The argument in this book, expressed in text and images, is not without difficulty for both the authors and the readers. These difficulties are unavoidable since we cannot employ the chronological templates of the academic historian, nor the ideological tent-poles of the cultural critic. Instead, we have the singular certainty of an eternal present, a multi-dimensional instant that voids and consumes what others think of as the 'past' and the 'future'. At difficult moments throughout the writing process we have been haunted by the vivid image of a person trying to repair the punctured tyre of a bike they are also riding. Using a multitasking approach, we have asked what might happen to ideas that disrespect the usual authorial hierarchies or presentational structures; what might happen when claims are subject to different categories of evidence and voices shift from 'past' to 'present', from impersonal to colloquial; what new possibilities might transpire if asides and ironies are collapsed into a single picture, and fully developed arguments are presented as one-liners written with the portentous ring of an advertising copywriter? One effect of this thought process has been to shift the balance of interpretation towards the reader as they engage with the thick membrane of text and images we provide. We had imagined a table in a café where our discussion went on, where an empty place was set for the reader. This reader (the same reader present over any writer's shoulder) we imagined as a fully desiring, articulate human who was anxious to make interventions - to quarrel, agree, become exasperated and possibly even slightly bored, or anxious to reach for the fast forward button or re-edit the tape with reckless jumps. We do not expect that the whole book will be essential reading for all readers, nor do we expect that the chapters will be read in sequence (Who does that these days anyway? Who ever did?) So if you happen to be scanning this in a bookshop then perhaps that is how we meant it to be encountered - standing, slightly distracted, and uncertain. The distinct pleasures to be had from browsing, eaves-dropping in cafés and over telephones however, precipitate the kind of fascination that only partial data can bring. We hope that this book offers these distinct pleasures as a consequence of its rhetorical strategy - to suggest more than we say. The book is divided into ten sections, each beginning with a formative assertion or proposition which serves as a useful springboard for discussion. Each section consists of images and words that embellish, and sometimes deviate from, the initial premise. The text contains of a number of sub-titled paragraphs which, as we have said of the sections themselves, can be approached in almost any order. Many of the images are included not to illustrate specific pieces of text, but as suggestions of ideas that cannot adequately be expressed in words. Side by side the authors shared their hard-disks, exchanged text by email, discussed ideas by telephone and took digital cameras and scanners to the world to make images in parallel with the conversations and writing. The result was the ideas contained herein. We offer the reader these ideas with a deliberate directness and economy which, we feel, is often missing from academic works. Since we do not claim that the postdigital membrane is a complete theory, or even a coherent set of ideas, we wish to leave open as many doors as we try to close. To this end, in parallel to this book, this web-site has been established where we intend that the debate will continue among those who occupy the empty chair at this discussion.

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