Cyberpunk

This article considers the (re)production of Hong Kong’s urban space in cyberpunk cinema, specifically in the American interpretation (2017) of Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995). How Chinatowns and Asian cities have inspired cyberpunk environments in both literature (e.g. Neuromancer 1984, Snow Crash 1992) and film (e.g. Blade Runner 1982, Ghost in the Shell 1995) has been extensively explored (e.g. Bruno 1987, Doel and Clarke 1997, Wong 2004). Asian urbanities have fed imaginations about density, verticality, and alienation. Wong (2004, 100) argues that, as filmic configurations of urban futures, Asian cities can be seen as prototypes of what capitalist world cities might become (King 1990 in Wong 2004, 100). Davis (2010, 140) points out, however, that while these cinematic cities signal certain Asian mobility, imaginaries of high-tech futures in the cyberpunk genre particularly emphasise the dark side of life, presenting grubby alleyways, shady business, and images the like.

Just as Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a cultural touchstone that signalled the end of Japan’s unfounded optimism of the bubble economy era, Attack on Titan is the revenant marking the post-2008 cultural shift from the free movement of globalised neoliberalism to the rising populism of the far-right and the normalisation of conspiracy theories. Game of Thrones, in the end, succumbed to the temptation of uncomplicated crowd-pleasers, which is why it has no re-watch value for me under lockdown. AoT and Eva, on the other hand, tackle what Mark Fisher termed the sense of a cancelled future under capitalist realism.

A cyberpunk művészeti irányzat a science fiction irodalmából indult világhódító turnéjára a nyolcvanas évek elején. A technológiába ágyazott emberi lét mikro-és makroszintű jelenségeit tematizálja. A társadalomnak és az egyénnek a mélyrétegekig visszavezethető diszfunkcióit, a mesterséges, hamis, elidegenedett, élhetetlenné vált gépezetet. De kezdjük az elejéről.

Le culture del cyberpunk sono culture che si affermano in un ben preciso momento storico, gli anni Ottanta, in cui lo sviluppo del post-fordismo sta fornendo una nuova spinta propulsiva alla storica e progressiva soppressione del tempo inutile vissuto quotidianamente, a favore di un uso funzionale del proprio tempo quotidiano ai sempre nuovi ritmi dell'economia, del commercio e del consumo. Ogni nuova scoperta e tecnologia della comunicazione viene socialmente, oltre che economicamente, sviluppata, prodotta, organizzata e finalizzata in funzione di logiche di dominio e di profitto, anziché verso il bene e gli interessi dell'umanità e dell'essere umano.
Da ogni attimo della giornata viene progressivamente espulsa ogni dimensione dell’“inutile”, di un vissuto cioè che sia in grado di sospendere la propria dimensione percettiva dalla sua funzione di sopravvivenza, per abbandonarsi in modo rituale all’esperienza della propria spiritualità.
Tale dimensione autentica dell’essere è, nel processo di storicizzazione dell’umanità, costantemente esautorata, soppressa, dalle strutture del dominio e dello sfruttamento.
Le nuove tecnologie della comunicazione digitale sono state trasformate e riproposte dalle culture del cyberpunk in una dimensione che ne permettesse l’uso rituale e sciamanico, al fine di ottenere, anche attraverso di esse, quella sospensione della percezione e del tempo così cruciale per la nostra resurrezione quotidiana.

This chapter intends to discuss the similarities between and political connotations of two Cuban novels, Erick Mota’s "Habana Underguater" ("Havana Underwater", 2010) and "Espejuelos para ver por dentro" ("Glasses to see the inside", 2019), by Maielis González. Both authors speculate about Cuba’s future from different perspectives in terms of style and subject.

[FORTHCOMING DECEMBER 2018]

Though cyberpunk gained prevalence throughout the 80s, 90s and the early 21st Century, it fell into relative disuse as one of science fiction’s flagship screen genres. Today, our ubiquitous use of technology has been critiqued in a number of films and television series that channel strands of cyberpunk (including Black Mirror, Her and Mr. Robot), though the genre as a whole is under-utilised on the screen. However, given cyberpunk’s origin as an intervention on current social, cultural, political and technological concerns, filmmakers and television showrunners of the late 2010s are once again demonstrating the genre’s ongoing ability to unpack and deconstruct these concerns with viewers. This paper investigates how textual creators are constructing their interpretations of cyberpunk as both a genre and a screen practice used to negotiate present-day anxieties. The paper examines three recent case studies and their respective primary creators: the television series Altered Carbon (created by Laeta Kalogridis) and Westworld (created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy), and the film Blade Runner 2049 (directed by Denis Villeneuve). All three case studies are adaptational texts, created respectively as a result of adapting (Altered Carbon), reimagining (Westworld) and progressing (Blade Runner) past cyberpunk texts. The paper unpacks these adaptations and their contemporising of cyberpunk genre conventions through their production strategies, cinematic language and creative influences, arguing for the merits of cyberpunk as an influential screen genre that is apt for engaging present-day audiences in vital discourses.

Produced for FALL/OUT programme, curated by Pluck Projects (Sarah Kelleher and Rachel Warriner), at Cork Midsummer Festival 2021. Five artworks — by Jessica Akerman, Pádraig Spillane, Anne Ffrench, David Mathuna & Andrew McSweeney, and Vicki Davis — were selected, with this catalogue consisting of individual textual responses to each.

Individual essay titles:
+ Pattern Recognition; response to Jessica Akerman's Cork Caryatids
+ Hyperaesthetics; response to Pádraig Spillane's Define Silver Lining
+ Time's Inhuman Nature; response to Anne Ffrench's To Hold Still
+ Cosmic Systems; response to David Mathúna & Andrew McSweene's As Above, So Below
+ A Machine, Just Like Me; response to Vicki Davis' Meatàn

The idea that human beings are not rationally autonomous beings is by no means new. In fact, one of the schools of thought that most decidedly adopted an antihumanist position in the twentieth century was structuralism. What seems novel at present is the idea of thinking of a "Post-human" condition, not only in the sense in which the universality of human nature is denied, but moreover in the possibility of a human being as an "Overman" (Ubermensch). Twenty-first century Mexican literature, especially the Cyberpunk, clearly show us this "crisis of humanism" that the world seems to be experiencing today and reveals to the reader the possibility to think of a "Posthuman" Mexico. Considering the works of Bioconservatives and Posthuman philosophers in this article I argue that Bernardo Fernandez' novel Gel azul not only addresses the issue of evolution towards a Posthuman era and shows the negative effects of biotechnology developments in humanity, but seems to point to the Mexican neoliberal paradigm that emerged in the nineties as the turning point of the Mexican dystopian future imagined. Fernandez articulates a linear vision between the present and the future to denounce the dehumanization of man and the disintegration of human communities. Mexico resumen: La idea de que los seres humanos no son seres racionalmente autónomos no es para nada novedosa. De hecho, una de las corrientes de pensamiento que más decididamente adoptó una posición antihumanista en el siglo XX fue el llamado estructuralismo. Lo que sí parece novedoso en la actualidad, es la idea de pensar en una condición "poshumana, " no sólo en el sentido de negar la universalidad de la naturaleza humana, sino incluso, en la posibilidad de pensar al ser humano como un "superhombre. " La literatura mexicana del siglo XXI, en especial la relacionada con el movimiento del ciberpunk, nos muestra claramente esta "crisis del humanismo" que parece estar viviendo hoy en día el mundo y revela al lector la posibilidad de pensar en un México "poshumano. " Tomando las observaciones de filósofos poshumanistas y bioconservadores, en este trabajo planteamos que la novela Gel azul de Bernardo Fernández, no sólo aborda el tema de la evolución hacia la poshumnanidad y muestra los efectos negativos de los avances biotecnológicos en el ser humano, sino que parece señalar al paradigma neoliberal mexicano que emerge en los años noventa como el punto de quiebre del futuro distópico mexicano imaginado. Fernández articula de esta manera una visión lineal entre el presente y el futuro para denunciar la deshumanización del hombre y la desintegración de las comunidades humanas. PAlAbrAs clAve: poshumanismo, neoliberalismo, deshumanización, ciberpunk, México dATe

SUMMARY
The ubiquitous use of digital technology in all aspects of daily life has opened up unprecedented possibilities such as immediate access to information, (tele)presence at any place on the planet, multiplication and modification of identity, as well as rearticulation and reconstruction of embodiment. In cyberpunk literature, new media art practices, cyber theories, SF films and comic books, and scientific research, there is often a tendency to leave the mortal physical body, behind in order to upload the immortal mind into the vast realm of the digital where one can be whatever or whomever s/he wants. In relation to modern technology,
the biological body is often regarded as obsolete for not being “equipped” to cope with the exponential speed of technological development. Hence, it is not surprising that many studies ignore the problem of embodiment by focusing more on the issues of identity, consciousness and disembodiment in digital worlds. Therefore, this book will attempt to highlight those theories that focus on embodiment in technologically mediated environments, thus reintegrating the physical body into discussions of new media phenomena and the ways they affect social reality today. In this book I will start from the hypothesis that without the physical body there is no virtual or real. The aim is to underline the significance of physical body in biotechnological interfaces, and to discuss and analyze the
ways in which the role of body and embodiment changes in ubiquitous virtual environments, as well as to map the ways in which technology alters bodily functions thus affecting ontological survival of humans as biological species.
The issues of constructing identities and identification processes will be observed through an anti-essentialist theoretical framework and mapped through two different but mutually intertwined phases in the evolution of global networks – Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 platforms. While Web 1.0 platforms were based on textual representations and identity play allowing us to become everything we are not
and can never be in the physical reality, Web 2.0 platforms that are specific to social networking delegate identities of physical reality in the virtual domain. However, presumed “real” identities manifest themselves as constructs in a virtual environment since they are based on a selective representation of an idealized self. Through feedback loops, this phenomenon further highlights the question of not only the quality of interpersonal relationships and communication, but also the way that we perceive and define ourselves in the physical environment. Dispersion
of boundaries between real and virtual, private and public, entails a fundamental question that this book will attempt to answer: What does it mean to be human in today’s world of digitalization when the explosion of digital imagery and interactions into the physical environment has so profoundly affected social, cultural and political activities, interventions and subversions, turning both the distinction between “real” and “virtual” spaces and dualistic ways of defining the self into rather obsolete concepts. Is anything at all “virtual” in cyberspace, i.e. can cyberspace be defined as virtual at all when, for example, because of an activity such as posting on Facebook, one can lose a job or has to let corporations dictate and define what is and what is not appropriate in the one’s digitally constructed identity? Nevertheless, we are still comforted by the illusion that our screen as an interface separates the real and the virtual, functioning as the boundary or line marking the end of real and the beginning of virtual. Everything situated on the other side of the screen, like a distorted mirror, allows us to rationalize and simplify the existence of the boundary between what defines us in physical reality and what we are as constructs in online interactions. However, what happens when the screen, that black mirror, breaks into pieces, thus enabling the body as interface to become responsible for the other Self or the digital alter ego? In this regard, special attention will be given to the concept of abandoning the screen and turning to the emerging new interfaces that rearticulate the relation between corporeality and virtuality. Gestural interfaces as a new “mouse” or a new touch screen without a screen will, coupled up with holographic projections that have already found their way into the physical public spaces, open up a multitude of far-reaching questions of psychosomatic nature: If, for example, we are present/telepresent to one another via holograms animated via corporeal gestures, would it mean the differentiation of degree of corporeality in terms of valuation and hierarchy of embodiment? How will we be able to determine what is more valuable, more present and real – projection or materiality of the body? And finally, will there be any difference at all between gesturally manipulated projection and the real body that is already deeply caught in the process of cyborgization? In William Gibson’s words, the future is already here - it is just not very evenly distributed.

The development of robot art ment. This is probably because robotics incorporates within itself a few charming, practical, and intellectual issues that are able to elicit the interest and curiosity of many philosophers, artists, scientists, technologists, and, overall, ordinary people.

Resumo: O presente artigo tem como objeto de estudo a cibermoda, a cybermoda ou a também chamada cyberfashion e suas influências na cibercultura e no ciberespaço. A cibermoda é a junção do "ciber" com a "moda", mas vai muito além de roupas tecnológicas. Veremos suas influências no meio ambiente, no cinema, no wearables computers, wearcomp ou nos também chamados "computadores vestíveis" e no cyberwear. Também veremos como a cibermoda é vista no cotidiano e nas tribos, com uma visão do movimento e da moda punk, que nasceu nos anos 60 em Londres e influenciou a moda Cyberpunk nos anos 80 e 90, chegando ao Estilo Matrix. O referencial teórico deste trabalho é baseado em autores como Maffesoli

The article attempts to outline the "genre field" of cyberpunk. It is argued that several aspects have to be taken into consideration when the field is being mapped out. In the specific case of Czech cyberpunk it is the way science fiction in general is conceived in society (both by fans and academic discourse), the level of knowledge as far as its Anglo-American counterparts are concerned, the position of computer technology within society, the publishing opportunities, and the pressure from other sub-genres of the fantastic. All this and more amounts to what the article labels as "subgenre" and concludes that, at least in the case of science fiction, a genre involves not only a reservoir of aesthetic and plot devices, but above all it is to be viewed as a culturally specific sedimentation of a historically specific cultural situation.

Poszthumán & cyberpunk világok Az ember(iség) jövőjéről szóló futurológiai előrejelzések izgalmas kísérletek, benépesítik a tudományos-szakmai világot csakúgy, mint a művészeteket. A tudományos-fantasztikus irodalom az egyik legaktívabb jövőgyár körülöttünk, úgy lapozgathatunk a víziók közt, mintha színpalettát tallóznánk. A teremtő technológia olyan dimenziókat nyitott meg előttünk, melynek létezésére nem is gondoltunk volna pár évtizeddel, egy évszázaddal korábban. Potenciális létmódjaink megsokszorozódtak, az emberi evolúció következő fázisa azonban még nem egyértelmű, tágas tér adódik fiktív jövőnk benépesítésére különböző elméletekkel. Válasszunk szét két terminust, a poszthumanizmust és a transzhumanizmust, mely két különböző perspektívából tekint a világra. " A transzhumanizmus egy projekt az emberi faj módosítására bármilyen magas szintű tudományos módszer segítségével, beleértve a genetikai tervezést, a digitális és biotechnológiát, " i írja Kevin LaGrandeur. A felvilágosodásig, humanizmusig visszavezethető irányzat centrumában az ember áll. A fő szempont a normál emberi funkciók és adottságok jobbítása, fejlesztése, kiterjesztése. Az emberi agyműködés és érzékelés fokozása, az emberi életminőség (egészség, élethossz) javítása áll középpontban, nem pedig emberi minőségeink alárendelése más, fejlettebb életformák lehetőségének. A poszthumán kifejezést ők az ember következő stádiumának tartják, hipotetikus fogalom egy majdani " új-emberre ". Ezzel szemben a poszthumanizmusban az ember nem élvez prioritást, felszámolódik az antropocentrikus elmélet. A fő szempont az intelligens rendszer, mely képes a tudatosságra, empátiára. Ily módon az ember nemcsak meghaladható, hanem hátra is hagyható, csak úgy, mint az emberi alak, test. Állatok, gépek, földönkívüli létformák, nem-antropomorf teremtmények mind alakító alannyá válhatnak a poszthumán jövőben. " A poszthumánt állapotként definiálhatjuk, amelyben az ember és az intelligens technológia egyre inkább összefonódik, " ii állítja Grandeur. És valóban, az irányzatok szétágaznak azon a ponton, hogy a poszthumanizmus szerint a poszthumán már köztünk jár, mi magunk is azok vagyok. " A transzhumanizmus emlékeztet minket, hogy testünk és társadalmunk szisztematikusan megváltoztatható a technológiával. A poszthumanizmus emlékeztet minket arra a számtalan változóra és hangra, amelyet meg kell hallanunk, a technológia hatásait is figyelembe véve. " iii Ismerve Gibson és Warren Ellis munkásságát, mindkét irányzatból meríthetünk, mégis, elsősorban a poszthumanizmus nézeteire támaszkodunk az elkövetkezőkben. Tehát a poszthumanizmus – mint technológiai és kulturális koncepció – megkérdőjelezi korunk ember-felfogását. A poszthumán szemlélet elsődleges célja a domináns diskurzusok felülírása, és egy új paradigma felállítása. A poszthumanizmus a " fix, autonóm, autentikus, koherens és univerzális " iv létezőként tételezett ember kritikáját fejti ki. A többségi társadalom által normativizált valóságunkban ez a rögzített emberkép természetes tényként adódik, pedig valójában egy konstruált, mesterséges fogalom, s mint

Anime and manga have become major entertainment exports of Japan since the last decades. As of 2006, Japanese anime comprise almost sixty percent of all animation broadcast worldwide. It generates four billion dollars a year in the United States alone, and foreign revenue account for almost twenty-five per cent of the income of leading Japanese animation companies such as Toei. Particularly in the Philippines, a substantial segment of young people are exposed to Japanese popular culture through these avenues. During the 90s, several anime series were shown in the two major television channels of the country usually dubbed in Tagalog. A few examples are Sailor Moon, Voltes V, Daimos, Doraemon, Mojacko, Thunder Jet and Ghost Fighter. A specific genre in this huge industry is science fiction. A most interesting and specific sub-genre within science fiction in general and Japanese animation and manga in particular, is cyberpunk.

This essay examines how the intervention of Anthropocene theory into the Blade Runner storyworld comes into conflict with the aesthetics of the franchise. On one hand, the world of Blade Runner 2049 is ravaged by climate change, creating an inhospitable environment. On the other, the film profoundly disavows this new anthropogenic condition by foregrounding the iconic designs of the first film to counterintuitively produce a neon
world of technological consumption, reproductive futurity and human perfectibility. The economic franchise logic that demands uncritical repetition of elements directly derived from the much earlier original film in order to build brand continuity for its core audience produces a fundamental tension between the franchise storyworld (a known narrative past that leads to a predictable narrative future) and the Anthropocene world (an unseen and unsettling event that has resulted in an unpredictable present and unknown future). The logics of inheritance and reproduction that fuel both franchise and 2049’s plot thus intersect, producing a narrative drive and visual register that actively disavows the conditions of
catastrophic climate change that the film’s worldbuilding otherwise makes visible. And it is this contradiction that makes 2049 truly of and for the Anthropocene as we know it; it is hard built into its ontology yet ignored at the level of human action.

The PhD dissertation Cyberpunk and New Media Art: Digital Art and Performance aims to examine the literary and visual legacy of the Cyberpunk movement and to explore its ideas, concepts and methodologies in the context of New Media artistic practices. The goal of this work is to comment on a multidisciplinary level on the influence of Cyberpunk theory and aesthetics. Furthermore, it seeks to identify its practice in the construction of the creative mechanisms of contemporary digital art and media performance.
The Cyberpunk phenomenon is approached through the definition of its socio- historical, philosophical and aesthetic context as a science fiction genre. Likewise, New Media Art is defined through the characteristics of its language, its precursors, its pioneers and the state of the digital art currents. By focusing on the terminology and the creative expression of Cyberpunk and Media Art, this thesis sets off to examine the artistic results that emerge from their union. Special emphasis is given to the fields of virtual technologies, technology and mythology and the body as a technologically enhanced interface.

Cyberpunk fictions of the late twentieth century have embarked on drastic departures from essentialist conceptualizations of identity. Cyberpunk’s themes and imagery as they unfold through William Gibson’s constellation of narratives in the Burning Chrome collection (1987) might tempt one to even speculate about the very relevance, or lack thereof, of individual and collective markers of identity, such as ethnicity, within the cyber-inflected culturescapes they bring into being. More specifically, Burning Chrome’s border-troubling cyberspace is populated by mythobodies/technobodies whose hybrid constitution and character throw into relief the patched and dispersed nature of subjectivity; inaugurate reconfigurations of identity characterized by unprecedented mutability and a sense of borderlessness; and precipitate a reconsideration of our conventional assumptions about ethnicity. In their relation to crisis, chaos, catastrophe, and the virtual, these post-ethnic figures may be said to manifest a savage hybridity that problematizes and even opens the possibility of dismantling oppressive ideologies of ethnic or even post-ethnic otherness. The very impermanent, diasporic, and liminal nature of their hybridity allows for the imagining of a post-ethnic politics of transfiguration that would get beyond the limits of the dominant concern with identity and difference.

This article maps out the conceptual origins of cybercrime in social science fiction and other 'faction' genres to explore the relationship between rhetoric and reality in the production of knowledge about it. It goes on to illustrate how the reporting of dystopic narratives about life in networked worlds shapes public reactions to technological change. Reactions which heighten the culture of fear about cybercrime, which in turn, shapes public expectations of online risk, the formation of law and the subsequent interpretation of justice. Finally, the article identifies and responds to the various mythologies that are currently circulating about cybercrime before identifying the various tensions in the production of criminological knowledge about it that contribute to sustaining those mythologies.

A dolgozat célja egyrészt bizonyítani, hogy a cyberpunk történetek megközelíthetőek a
cybertér, illetve az egyéb alternatív technikai térkonstrukciók narrativizációiként, másrészt meghatározni azt a narratológiai és poétikai interpretációs keretet, amely révén a cyberpunk körébe tartozó alkotások elemezhetőek. A belső technikai terek ábrázolása, narrativizációja,valamint az írásbeliség utáni mozgóképek bemutatása a cyberpunk műfajának szorosanösszefüggő, egymás nélkül elképzelhetetlen jegye. Ez a (társ)mű vészeti egymásrautaltságméltán tart számot kitüntetett figyelemre, továbbá a cyberpunk térhódításának alapjául is szolgál. A munka megkísérli a science fictionből kitermelődő cyberpunk meghatározását, külön figyelmet szentelve az irodalmi és filmtörténeti
előzményeknek, a  Neurománc című,műfajteremtő William Gibson-regénynek, Philip K. Dick és Dan Simmons szövegeinek,illetve ezek filmadaptációinak is a legfrissebb vonatkozó alkotások vizsgálata mellett.

This article defines the ‘post’ part of Post-Cyberpunk as it appears in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995). Marketed as a Post-Cyberpunk novel, The Diamond Age adopts some of Cyberpunk’s genre-specific motifs such as setting the novel in a near-future dystopia and embedding cyberspace as a “microworld” (McHale). This article extends and adapts Brian McHale’s definition of Cyberpunk from Constructing Postmodernism (1992) to a definition of Post-Cyberpunk, while showing how Post-Cyberpunk can be considered part of the Romantic tradition. McHale defines Cyberpunk using motifs of “worldness,” motifs of “the centrifugal self,” and motifs of “death both individual and collective.” My analysis shows The Diamond Age is Cyberpunk to the extent it adopts this postmodern worldness and dissolution of self. However, the text is also Post-Cyberpunk because it subverts Cyberpunk’s motifs of individual and collective death. According to Northrop Frye, Romanticism is a “new mythology” that attempts to recover the life-affirming power of nature in magical terms. Stephenson’s subversion of death is Romantic because his protagonist Nell’s quest for a better life is a deliberate rewriting of the life-affirming concerns of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Additionally, Nell’s quest is motivated by the magical realist nanotechnological device – the Primer – which allows her to redefine her world in magical terms. I evaluate the extent to which The Diamond Age is truly Post-Cyberpunk based on Stephenson’s (mis)use of Jung’s spiritual theories and make some suggestions for thinking beyond Stephenson’s version of the genre.

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

subgenres in speculative fiction. Past-tomorrows and future-yesterdays: Metahistorical Narratives & Scientific Metafictions is a foray into spatial and temporal grids explored by the literary production of the last forty years. Set at the crossroads of several cultural tensions, the metahistorical nature of contemporary narratives and metafictional approaches to scientific discourses in recent fictions problematize concepts of history and practices of science. By means of a radical fragmentation, ramification, and quantification of the plot, the selfreflexivity inherent to metafiction redoubles on a metahistorical hetero-reflexivity. Likewise, the pluridiscursivity inherent to historicity recoils upon the pluridiscursivity of the novel. "this fiction […] portrayed the nature of narrative history rather than the specific facts of historical accounting." Amy J. Elias "the most arresting, ambitious, and significant fiction written in English in the past four or five decades is, in this way, metahistorical: it summons, fractures, and re-invents history." Susan Strehle "extensive engagement with 'real' history and fictional supplement demonstrates how abstract notation systems (fictions) are complexly embedded in materiality." Sherryl Vint

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

This chapter examines Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) as exemplary of recent cyberpunk culture. It interprets the film against the backdrop of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, drawing upon the concept of “capitalist realism,” developed by the cultural theorist, Mark Fisher. Using Fisher’s concept of capitalism, the film is used to address contradictions and problems in contemporary critical theories, such as new materialism and posthumanism. As a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Villeneuve’s film is compared to the original to develop some of the thematic differences between the two and to show how the new film expresses the contemporary significance of cyberpunk as an ethical genre. It brings to the surface two of the most pressing ethical dilemmas facing us today - climate change and digital automation - and shows how the film raises questions about the essence of human subjectivity and its relation to these problems.

Literature has been an imitator of life for generations on this earth, this literature has voiced the voiceless. Recent contemporary and postmodern literary theories have catered to burgeoning notions of logic that go beyond human survival on the planet. Science fiction is a genre of fiction that encompasses imaginative concepts like futuristic scientific-technological settings, faster than light, past and future spatial time travel, the existence of parallel universes and extraterrestrial life etc. An outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by a novel acute respiratory syndrome of coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) occurred in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. The outbreak was declared as a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization on 30 January 2020. During this crisis, literature also plays an important role and apocalyptic literature has shown the disastrous consequences if humans didn’t stop their behaviour and attitude towards the world.  This research project aims to take literature out of the realm of imagination and present the harsh realities of culture. This study revealed how literature represents the truth of the world that science is learning every day, and how certain inventions can have harmful effects if they are not halted in time. This research analysed the novel Oryx and Crake in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and pointed a convincing glimpse of the future. Snowman (protagonist), known as Jimmy before humanity was overrun by science, is trying to live in a world where he might be the last human Snowman tells the tale of how Crake’s scientific ambitions contributed to the abolition of human civilization. The researcher emphasizes how the reel depicts reality and how people are to blame for the degradation of their world.

The key setting in William Gibson’s speculative “Bridge” trilogy (1993-1999) is a massive shantytown on the site of the Bay Area Bridge near San Francisco. This article argues that the novels, and their characterization of the shanty space in particular, offer crucial insight into the way late capitalism produces—and then hides from view—vulnerable life. The novels are particularly useful for clarifying recent debates about precarity as imagined by Isabell Lorey and Judith Butler. As these sources explain, precariousness denotes to the essential vulnerability and inter-dependency that defines social life; precarity, in contrast, describes the socio-economic stratification that leaves certain segments of the population more exposed to this vulnerability than others. Gibson’s Bridge novels contribute to this discussion by providing a space, in the form of the massive shantytown, for imagining how we might begin to disentangle vulnerability from the weaponized form of precarity associated with late capitalism. Ultimately, this account offers a new reading of Gibson’s fiction by stressing how it imagines an inclusive social model in the context of neoliberal dystopia. For scholars interested in how literature accounts for precarity, the Bridge series reflects speculative fiction’s capacity for illustrating precarity’s past, present, and future.

Nuestra historia comienza en los límites de la civilización, donde un joven aparentemente normal está sufriendo los tormentos de la angustia adolescente. Sin que lo sepan los patanes que le rodean (y quizá sin que lo sepa él mismo) es, de hecho, el heredero legítimo, aunque exiliado, del trono del Imperio, o un superhombre mutante de incógnito, o el propietario de poderes mágicos latentes, o un cíberbrujo portentoso, o quizá, sencillamente, un fuera de serie con la espada de doble filo.

The main aim of this paper is to retrieve and analyze some literary “memories as projections of the future” belonging to the core ideological point, a few decades ago, in which Sci-Fi started to offer, thanks to the development of cyberpunk, glimpses of the new and problematic articulation of being as a conflicting processor of painful information
and forerunner of a languishing traumatized humanity. More
specifically, this paper centers on the first story ever published by William Gibson, the well-known guru of cyberpunk, and on his presentation there of the first posthuman character in his fiction.

This article performs a close reading of the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While developing the argument for an ‘ironic’ usage of the concept of the Anthropocene. This ironised conception is one that intends to countenance both the Anthropocene’s strength as a designation of human impact on the non-human and the important, valid critiques responding to the Anthropocene. Philip K Dick’s work, in particular Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a superb illustration of such an ironic dynamic because of the dual narrative structure present. For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? raises questions about human identity that, while metaphysical, have great significance materially for the characters in the novel, and can be understood as a form of structural discrimination.  To demonstrate this ironic duality that should be brought to the Anthropocene, the article draws on Nick Land’s essay Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical I...

Posthuman Transformations: Bodies and Texts in Cyberspace explores the re/positioning of the human body and the evolution of the textual body in technological culture. Through the examination of a selection of fictional texts - both print and computer-mediated - an extensive account of the transformations of the bodies of fictional characters and the actual reader in interaction with/(in) cyberspace is presented. The book is interdisciplinary - at the crossroads of posthumanism, postmodern literary theory, phenomenology and the philosophy of technology. The author seeks to answer the interrelated questions: How is the human body imagined in print and computer-mediated fictional texts? What is the body’s role in redefining the human in technological culture?

Интердисциплинарното изследване на Александра Главанакова разглежда пресечните точки между постхуманизъм, постмодерна литературна теория, феноменология, философия на технологиите. Авторката търси отговор на въпросите, как е представено човешкото тяло в печатните и в компютърно опосредстваните художествени текстове; как ролята на тялото предефинира човека в технологичната култура.

Sofia University Press
http://press-su.com/katalog-na-izdaniyata/poreditzi/878-posthuman-transformations.html

Internet archive: https://archive.org/details/GlavanakovaPosthumanTransformationsBookPRINT/mode/2up

Scribd:
https://www.scribd.com/document/288533969/Alexandra-Glavanakova-Posthuman-Transformations-Bodies-and-Text-in-Cyberspace

The essay explores the ramifications of the potential of digitising consciousness, preserving memory and subjectivity on the distinctive technological ground which enables and facilitates the utopia named San Junipero. This possibility, which broaches ever-louder into public discourse, pronounces the raw hope of sustaining the weave of life without life itself; the hope for a digital life more living than that of the flesh: vita realissima. In this hope, one does not find a mere supplement of life, the blissfully amnesiac shadows of Hades, but a life more living, more real than reality. Yet, something unsettling in the resurrected paradise compels our humanity to cling to the real. We hold on to it principally, being prepared to wager pain and suffering for its sake: this is the reality principle. The essay resignifies the Freudian analysis of the reality principle, which establishes an economy of desire and pleasure in the face of death, through Beaudrillard's exposition of the articulation of the historical contingency that we call reality. It aims thus to examine the significance of the place and function of death in our understanding and experience of the familiar reality of our human destiny, vis-à-vis a reality that promises to be without death, if not without pain and suffering. Accordingly, the essay takes up anew the Platonic project of philosophy as a 'study of death'-as exigent in the post-simulated world as at the dawn of occidental thought.

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of bachelor of arts in Film and Television.


This paper surveys the points of divergence between Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) in terms of how they portray their protagonist blade runners' identity, personal lives and their jobs. The main disparities are analysed through concepts of modernity and postmodernity, the latter being specifically applied to the former movie by previous authors with similar approaches. In examining the differences between these two movies, an attempt in cognitive mapping of the cultural differences between the times the movies were made in has come into fruition. By comparing the political and societal differences between 1982 and 2017 with movie universe's differences between 2019 and 2049 and analysing the projection of these variances on the main characters, a historically materialistic progression from postmodernity into today’s social and political culture is discussed.

Cyberpunk teknolojinin hat safhaya ulaştığı, yapay zekanın insan zekasına eş değer konuma geldiği, makine-insan birleşimlerinin yaşandığı, transhümanizmin benimsendiği, karanlık ve kaos içeren bir geleceğin tasvir edildiği bir bilim kurgu dalı olarak tanımlanmaktadır. Teknolojinin sürekli olarak devinim ve gelişim halinde olması gelecek yıllarda hayatımızın her alanında teknolojiyle iç içe olmayı gerektirecektir. 1980'lerden bu yana edebiyat başta olmak üzere, müzik, video oyunları ve sinema sektöründe Cyberpunk türünde birçok eser verilmiştir. Özellikle sinema sektörü bu türü kısa sürede benimsemiş ve yıllar içinde değişim göstererek çok sayıda eser sunmuştur. Sinema sektörü Cyberpunk'ı görsel bağlamda bizlere en iyi şekilde aktarmaktadır. Bu araştırmada elli adet Cyberpunk türünde film örnek olarak verilmiş ve aralarından üç adet film, içerdiği iç mekân verileri açısından incelenmek için tercih edilmiştir. Filmler birden çok kez izlenmiş ve görsel göstergebilim metoduyla incelenmiştir. Kesin yargıları olmayan, hala gelişmekte ve değişmekte olan Cyberpunk türü ile üretilen filmlerin iç mekân tasarımı açısından benzer özelliklerine değinilmiştir. İncelenen bu üç filmde, iç mekân tasarımı ve mobilya tasarımına dair detaylı bir çalışmanın mevcut olmadığı görülmüştür. Filmlerde ortak olarak iç mekânlar soğuk ve kasvetli olarak tasvir edilmiş, mobilyalar genelde modern ve fütüristik çizgide kullanılmıştır. Gelecek yüzyılda teknolojinin bu denli gelişmesiyle sadece insan-makine birleşimi değil; aynı zamanda mobilya ve iç mekânın teknoloji ile birleşimi de göz önüne alınmalıdır. Bu sayede gelişmiş teknolojiyi insan hayatının yararına, yaşam kalitesini yükseltmek amacıyla kullanmak mümkündür.

Urban Space Beyond Dystopia: Fragments of Cyberpunk Cities 20 th century has undoubtedly been the golden age of technological development in the entire human history. Inevitably, such a rapid incorporation of technology into human life had immense social, economic, political and urbanization effects. Aim of my research is to showcase examples from films under the influence of the Cyberpunk movement, which opposes the technological optimism of the futurist movement. In cinema, the movements of Futurism and Cyberpunk perhaps represent the most extreme ends of the spectrum of technological evaluation. Against the ambitious glorification of technology in Futurism, the Cyberpunk defended a totally pessimist perspective on the consequences of further mechanization. Accordingly, the movements of art bear a remarkable role of infusing and diffusing the technological culture during periods of technologization. In this sense, Cyberpunk and Futurist films are significant examples for the last century as they clearly reveal how the perception of technology evolves over time in art and how this evolution itself is related to the preceding social, political and environmental developments.