[key texts] Oshii, Haraway, Cunningham, Gibson
Some video fragments for a Wednesday afternoon; loosely indicative of where my brain is at this precise moment.
1. Clip from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence – a brilliant film, directed by Mamoru Oshii:
The female forensic specialist is named for Donna Haraway, which segues nicely into the second clip.
2. Video montage (mash-up) inspired by Haraway’s landmark feminist essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto‘. Created by YouTube user artlessartist, this includes some really nice footage, particularly that of the different examples of cyborg and robot:
3. Music video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love’ – directed by Chris Cunningham:
Supposedly, Cunningham was the inspiration for an minor character in Pattern Recognition (2003) – the (absent) owner of the flat Gibson’s protagonist is house-sitting:
‘Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien’s videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful, she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn halflight, their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.’
- William Gibson, 2003: p. 5
4. Clip from No Maps for These Territories (2000), with Gibson talking about technology:
[key texts] Wired UK 12.09
Riding on the tailcoats of my January internship with the zeitgeist-riding wunderkinder of Wired UK, I’ve got two short pieces in the December issue – both as part of the feature, ‘25 Ideas for 2010+‘. It’s my first professional byline, in one of the most awesome individual magazine issues to spit on the much-touted ‘death of news’, and – naturally – I’m all kinds of adrenal.
© image credit: the conde nast publications ltd.
Now that it’s safely in print, I feel comfortable pointing you to a copy of the email interview I conducted with Swedish doctoral student Jonas Anderson. There’s some seriously interesting stuff in there, very little (unfortunately) of which made it into the final 250 words.
Oh, and with the apparent ratification of Lisbon, it’ll be interesting to see the reception Amelia Andersdotter gets from the European Parliament (and the media) when taking her seat at the start of December. Researching the Wired piece, I spent fifteen minutes transfixed by her interview with Andrew Keen for (of all things) The Daily Telegraph:
Setting aside my own nascent megalomania for a moment (if we must), the December issue also contains Mic Wright‘s fantastic feature on photographic miracle the Impossible Project – mentioned briefly in my delirious (and slightly incoherent) economic analysis of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Makers. Also: heaps of nifty infographics, airfix hacking, and Warren Ellis’ spirited defence of phonic curmudgeon Paul Morley.
Now, most of this is probably available online, but – admit it – you need the tactility of print. Underneath it all is the realisation that it’s just not practical to take your laptop to the toilet with you. Netbook, maybe, but not your laptop …
[key texts] Transhuman Space
For me, Transhuman Space is a key text – a book that’s had a wholly disproportionate impact on the shape of my life. An RPG setting published to critical acclaim in 2002, it stood as a plausible vision of where humanity might be at the turn of the twenty-second century:
“It’s the year 2100. Humans have colonized the solar system. China and America struggle for control of Mars. The Royal Navy patrols the asteroid belt. Nanotechnology has transformed life on Earth forever, and gene-enhanced humans share the world with artificial intelligences and robotic cybershells. Our solar system has become a setting as exciting and alien as any interstellar empire. Pirate spaceships hijacking black holes . . . sentient computers and artificial “bioroids” demanding human rights . . . nanotechnology and mind control . . . Transhuman Space is cutting-edge science fiction adventure that begins where cyberpunk ends.”
Stumbling across a copy in my local bookshop as a wide-eyed 16-year old, Transhuman Space was my first encounter with the ideas of transhumanism, morphological freedom and ubiquitous computing.
It blew my tiny teenage mind.