I like to think
of myself as someone who sits on the curb of the info-highway, bemusedly
watching all the traffic whiz by--and also as someone who occasionally
darts out into the traffic to pick up interesting litter. I frame my
paper in these terms because I believe we can learn a lot by examining
the linguistic litter thrown off in the actual conversation about technology
policy in the United States. --Tim Rohrer
In this article,
I will first of all situate the question of cyber-bodies in the framework
of postmodernity, stressing the paradoxes of embodiment. I will subsequently
play a number of variations on the theme of cyber-feminism, highlighting
the issue of sexual difference throughout. -- Rosi Braidotti
A paper read to
the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923 by J. B. S. Haldane.
"Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is
already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him
into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler's even more horrible vision
correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage
of the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines which will
successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery
of this planet?"
Chapter XXV from
The
Education of Henry Adams "As he grew accustomed to the
great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as
a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet
itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual
or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length
at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming
an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of
power -- while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.
Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the
natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the
thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some,
but it was the most expressive." --Henry Adams (1900)
"For its first
step into cyberspace, Grove is launching a cutting-edge website for
Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century
(Grove Press, February '96), cyber-critic Mark Dery's study of fringe
computer culture. The tech-noir site features excerpts from Escape
Velocity, links to related sites, and everything you wanted
to know (but were afraid to ask) about do-it-yourself cyborgs, postmodern
primitives, technopagans, rogue roboticists, reanimated roadkill, and
RoboCopulation."
An Annotated Bibliography
by David Silver on Cyberspace, hyperspace, virtual space - Virtual communities,
virtual realities, virtual identities - Cyborgs, cybernetics, science
fiction - Spectacles, simulations, simulacra. Postcertainties and postmodernity.
"Just as the physical laws of perspective apply to artists like
Da Vinci, Alberti, and Durer, who referred to the image as if they
were explaining geometrical and mathematical concepts, the composition
of the computational image is constituted from numerical relationships.
The difference is that this "new" numeric conception of the
image has a micro and internal character, since it's located in each
particle/pixel that composes the digital image." --Andres Tapia-Urzua
Theory & Event 5:1 "In this essay, I look at the reconfiguring of
technologically mediated communication from technocracy into technoculture.
I begin with Apple's "1984" commercial. This announcement
of the Macintosh is the media moment that marks the demise of Big Brother
and the emergence of the Little Brothers. Second, I highlight the communicative
ideal of publicity in the rhetoric of computer liberation and the information
revolution. …third, with a focus on the suspicions of secrecy that accompany
the rhetoric of publicity, I look at imaginings of programmers as a
mysterious priesthood of the computer."--Jodi Dean
My purpose in
this long introduction [to the Macintosh DESKTOP and TRASHCAN metophor]
is ... to introduce via anecdotes the tremendous challenge metaphors
pose to interface design. I see not only a tension between the literal
and magical qualities of metaphor, but a tension between the users'
feeling that the computer is an extension of their bodies and believing
that it is an "other"--a sentient being with a consciousness of its
own (and usually a malevolent consciousness at that). --Tim Rohrer
"[we] want to
argue that the movement in space that the rescue plot seems to motivate
is itself the point, the topic, and the goal and that this shift in
emphasis from narrativity to geography produces features that make Nintendo®
and New World narratives in some ways strikingly similar to each other
and different from many other kinds of texts." -- Mary Fuller and Henry
Jenkins
"How Can New Interactive
Communication Technology Enhance Harmonious and Functional Communities
at all Scales Worldwide?" Report of an Exploratory Aspen Workshop prepared
by Bruce Murray, California Institute of Technology, February, 1995.
"Studies of human artifacts as cause and consequence of socio-cultural
development.' Resources compiled by Martin Ryder, University of Colorado
at Denver. Highlights include resources on Jacques Ellul, Andrew
Feenberg, and Lewis Mumford and "Concepts and Names Related
to the Theory of Technology."
Theory & Event 3:4 | 2000 Michael Uebel. "The new fantasmic
dimensions of cyberpornography are my focus in this essay. It is my
contention that, as the media of mass-circulating porn are changing,
as bits and binary codes replace glossy centerfolds, fantasy is being
activated in novel ways. Cyberspace is installing a new regime of sexual
representation and, with it, tactical modes of dreaming, thinking,
and acting. The pornographic image, more than ever, occupies the interspace
bridging private fantasy and mass public disposition."
"The challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far
beyond the issue of narrative. Digital media redefines the very identity
of cinema. " --Lev Manovich
"What counts as digital media may also be up for grabs. Digital theory
may address anything from the role of CGI special effects in Hollywood
blockbusters to new systems of communication (the net), new genres
of entertainment (the computer game), new styles of music (techno)
or new systems of representation (digital photography or virtual reality).
All of these different things reflect a shift from the computer as
a tool, primarily understood in terms of information storage and numerical
calculation, to the computer as a medium of communication, education,
and entertainment. Each attracts their own cadre of theorists asking
different questions." --Henry Jenkins
