P2PU Cyberpunk

1. SCREAMS_ SCREENS_ FLATLINES: CYBERNETICS, POSTMODERNISM AND THE GOTHIC 2. BODY IMAGE FADING DOWN CORRIDORS OF TELEVISION SKY: THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC IMPLOSION OF SUBJECTIVITY 3. XEROX AND XENOGENESIS: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION AND GOTHIC PROPAGATION 4. BLACK MIRROR: HYPERNATURALISM, HYPERREALITY AND HYPERFICTION

"This is nice technology, but get real with the dumb comments like, "I'll be sawing my own arms asap!" I'm sure this lady would tell you that she'd give anything to have her sense of touch back, and she's not going to get that."

"Bill Gibson has been masquerading as a Canadian writer for some time now, carrying out his own version of Stephen Daedalus's "silence, exile, and cunning"; but to figure the man at all, you've got to know he was born in Virginia and grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed. "

1. Beyond Blade Runner 2. Scanscape 3. Free Fire Zone 4. The Half-Moons of Repression 5. The Neighbors are Watching 6. Mini-Citadels and Geroncrats 7. Parallel Universes 8. Hollywood(s): Powers of Simulation 9. The Toxic Rim 10. Before We Wake...

SLIDES!!1

"The Contributions of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner to the Landscapes of the Twenty-First Century"

"The representations of Los Angeles (as endless suburb; a physical embodiment of postmodern/post-Fordist decentralisation) and New York (as high density modernist metropolis) both have utopian and dystopian elements. Blade Runner's strength is that it anticipated many of the anxieties surrounding postmodern futures, and did so at a very early stage."

"I didn't 'get' the story at all"

"Years later, I was having lunch with Ridley, and when the conversation turned to inspiration, we were both very clear about our debt to the Metal Hurlant [the original Heavy Metal magazine] school of the '70s--Moebius and the others. But it was also obvious that Scott understood the importance of information density to perceptual overload. When Blade Runner works best, it induces a lyrical sort of information sickness, that quintessentially postmodern cocktail of ecstasy and dread. It was what cyberpunk was supposed to be all about."

"Not all the movie's predictions have come true. The cityscape was littered with advertising hoardings and neon displays - many of which related to companies which have since suffered the so-called curse of Blade Runner. "

"Cyberpunk suggests, once again, that SF really can be about the world and not just about the author's mind. For me, the best thing about cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just pretend that the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again."

For Donna Haraway, we are already assimilated. - A visit with D. Haraway

"What has become of this politicized science-fictional trope over twenty years after Haraway's manifesto? Does it still hold any radical potential for redefinition of identity, feminist or not? How do cyborgs now compare to cyborgs as they were first envisioned? In order to examine these questions, we will first take a look at the origin of the cyborg in science fiction. "

"VAG had mounted an ambitious if oddly titled (The Uncanny) show around the theme of "the cyborg". Since this seemed to be "the cyborg" as academics understand "the cyborg", and not just a cyborg, or cyborgs, as you or I might understand cyborg(s) I took it upon myself to lower the tone of the proceedings with the following."

"interview with Indiana University professor Andy Clark. Clark is author of several books, most recently Natural-Born Cyborgs"

"A fairly comrehensive look at defining a cyborg and why we are inevitably meandering towards it. It also describes the various stages of cyborg and likens these stages to the equivalent external technologies."

In the early 1980's SF author Bruce Sterling, under the pseudonym "Vincent Omniaveritas", edited a series of one-page newsletters titled Cheap Truth. (It's usually referred to as a samizdat, after the mimeographed newsletters dissidents circulated among themselves in Communist Eastern Europe.) In them, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and other members of a loose-knit group of SF writers (called by themselves "the Movement") attacked what they considered the stagnant state of the time's popular science fiction and hyped their own works. As such, they document the development of the literary consciousness of many of the writers of works later dubbed "cyberpunk".

Tom Maddox on the genisis & life of cyberpunk

Looks kinds shitty, may contain some OK info

Read this just after you read Cheap Truth. "Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. This is cyberpunk."