This week's reading "The Cyborg Mother: A Breaches Boundary" by Jaimie Smith-Windsor strikes a much more emotional tone to last week's Haraway piece. This weeks article and screenings (Sarah Connor Chronicles) have certainly raised the question on whether humans are already cyborgs, this has been addressed earlier in the course but now I truly feel the topic has come to the surface of our focus; and I have found the reading highly engaging in terms of the ideas explored.
Friday 20 November 2009
Cyborgs & Robots 2
This week's reading "The Cyborg Mother: A Breaches Boundary" by Jaimie Smith-Windsor strikes a much more emotional tone to last week's Haraway piece. This weeks article and screenings (Sarah Connor Chronicles) have certainly raised the question on whether humans are already cyborgs, this has been addressed earlier in the course but now I truly feel the topic has come to the surface of our focus; and I have found the reading highly engaging in terms of the ideas explored.
Saturday 14 November 2009
Cyborgs & Robots 1
This week we look in more detail at 'The Cyborg', focusing on Donna Haraway's Manifest for Cyborgs. Cyborg have featured in a variety of representations already on the course; and the topic is quickly becoming more and more relevant to today's modern culture as we continually fuse technology with our organic material. The most improtant thing to consider when analyzing Haraway's arguments is that the piece is titled 'A Manifesto', by its true nature a manifesto is a political document, this essay is no different; it was written at a radical time in socialist-feminism movements, it was designed for longevity and revolution.
Saturday 7 November 2009
Play 2: eXiztenZ
Saturday 31 October 2009
Play: 1 (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within)
Saturday 24 October 2009
Perception
I found the readings this week very interesting, especially Lev Manovich's "The poetics of augmented Space".
Friday 23 October 2009
New Worlds: Cyber Punk
The first reading (Mischa Peters)I found particularly interesting especially at the beginning when concerning the post-human/cyborg approach. That we somehow have become beyond human; utilizing technology to connect the neurons within our brains to virtual reality, or to some enhancement technology. The first page has a quote from Hockenberry's text from Wired magazine; "Your body. Get over it. (Think mind over matter)". In a way this sums up the digital body, the releasing of our physical matter from our minds; this becomes particularly interesting when applying this notion to the accompanying screened film, "Screamers (1995)". We learn that the character Jessica Hanson is in fact an advanced screamer, yet her physical form and mind is so true to ours; blood, emotion, intelligence etc. The fact that we can be tricked by our own minds when presented with something physical, one has to question whether this would be the case if we were 'plugged' into VR, having our minds separated from the terrestrial plane from which we base our judgements on. Yet the key thing to remeber is that screamers does not however feature a VR environment, or a 'jacking in' of characters.
Thursday 8 October 2009
Techno Working Dependancies
Ex-Machina was thoroughly enjoyable and like many graphic novels has many deeper themes running through it. What particularly interested me is directly an analysis based on David Bell's Essentialist Belief and Post-Modernist viewpoints. In a way Ex-Machina is very similar to Robocop (The feature for this week), it has many similar themes regarding the relationships between technology and work/occupation.
Monday 5 October 2009
Cyber Culture 2
After watching the Lawnmower Man, the first thing jumped to my attention was in some ways how far ahead of its time the film was. Sure the graphics are a little primeval, and some ways very outdated, but the key thing is to understand that the film was only released in 1992. Virtual Reality in the form shown in the film was only really in existence by the mid 1980s, so it wasn't long before the film started to dramatize a ideas already in motion about the pro's and con's of VR.
Sunday 27 September 2009
Introduction to Visual Culture & Cyber-Culture
It is true to say that as a modern society we have become more aware of visual representation (as opposed to textual), a phenomenon that because of its increasing importance with our everyday lives; we strive to understand it, in a way to understand our own lives and how they function. Mirzoeff rightly claims that “human experience is more visual [...] than ever before”. His statement is backed up with the good examples of satellite imagery, X-ray and medical imaging. We continually rely on the image; to help us live our lives more efficiently and be able to express ourselves. Yet as much as the image aids us in our advancement of human existence, it is also the very element of existence that we fear the most; CCTV is just one form of imagery than inhibits our freedom, rights and ability to live an independent life. Many “shocking” films and pieces of pop culture (most notably that of cyber-culture); use the abuse and exploitation of the image to frighten their audiences (eg, The Matrix “what we see really isn’t what is real”). Also to be able to visualize the unseen, Mirzoeff briefly touches on this with his example of the Jamie Bulger case, whereby our imaging technology apparently creates improved security which is good, yet it didn’t prevent the crime from happening. However without this technology way may never have known the true happenings of the crime. This “Big Brother” aspect to our lives is reinforced in the film Threshold (2005), whereby the prisoners are put into the room together and controlled from an exterior location. This interesting scenario says two things; it suggests the absurdity of the constant worries over our fears with disease and surveillance; yet, as the reading points out, it is also reinforcing the reality of our situation and offering a new take on an issue so readily dramatized in cyber-pop.
When reading the piece by Mirzoeff there are certain areas of the reading that link so closely with the set films. The first opening part of the 6th Day (2000) features the quote:
“God created man in his own image, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” Genesis 1.27.31
We all know this to be a quote from the bible, yet it echoes what Mirzoeff states on page 9 of the reading. He briefly mentions a theory from Pluto stating that “objects encountered in everyday life are just bad copies of the perfect ideal of those objects”. This very old notion of recreation is perhaps the reason behind the human cloning/genetics ideologies present in cyber-culture, the idea that we suddenly have the technology to make ourselves seemingly better than what we were intended to be. Many aspects of Cyber-culture use biblical foundations a way to develop a binary opposition between right and wrong. A simple techno-figuration (as described by Donna Haraway). Like many other cyber-pop productions we must have an element of familiarity before our eventual exposure to a new innovation. The main point that I took major interest from in the reading was the short passage on “Cyber-Pop and Paradox” in the Cyber-poetics as methodology reading. The very interesting thing about this section is the idea that what we can gain from technology, we can also lose. For example, if we take this and apply it to a cyber-pop context (whereby elements of both fiction and fact are present), we can see in many sci-fi films we create robots/clones to obtain greater control and efficiency over our lives. Yet, as you would expect in a compelling narrative, this very same technology leads to the break-down of society, in essence, a lack of control or efficiency (ie I Robot, The Matrix, Blade Runner, The Island; and of course the 6th Day). It is such a major part of cyber-culture and modern popular culture ranging from film all the way to street graffiti. These visual representations of the arrangements of power and social orders are what visual culture is all about, decoding messages from images; and what makes cyber-pop so intriguing is the level of decoding available. A convention of a great cyber-culture production is one where multiple decoding can take place, the audience to be left with familiarity but also with ambiguity. This ambiguity is what intrigues the human mind, we are not satisfied and so must explore the topic in more depth – for example The Matrix, whereby it is almost impossible to develop a single solid resolution for its meaning. In essence, re-description.