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ENG 670: WEEK FOUR Media Ecologies + Cyberpunk’s Landscape. TOPICS. Digital humanities project The potential of images, maps, models & soundscapes for ecocriticism Neuromancer Discussion Cyberpunk & Cyberspace Research essay ALERT: Chris Jordan exhibit & public lectures. FOR NEXT WEEK.
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ENG 670: WEEK FOUR Media Ecologies + Cyberpunk’s Landscape
TOPICS • Digital humanities project The potential of images, maps, models & soundscapes for ecocriticism • Neuromancer DiscussionCyberpunk & Cyberspace • Research essay • ALERT: Chris Jordan exhibit & public lectures
FOR NEXT WEEK • Hayles, Chs. 1, 3 & 5, Electronic Literature • Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness” (PDF) • Review Stephanie Strickland’s “Slipping Glimpse” + Lisa Robertson’s “The Weather” • Examine 3 short e-texts on Hayles CD: “The Cape” by JR Carpenter; “Accounts of the Glass Sky” by MD Coverley; “Tao” by Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim.
Digital Humanities Project “At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.” – Chris Anderson
What are the possibilities for ecocriticism in the digital age?
1. Map cultural responses to ecosystems and environmental crises
2. Analyze quantitatively the “environmental imagination” of texts
3. Translate / critique scientific models of environmental problems
4. Develop a creative critical praxis of multimodal interpretation & mash-up
Group Project Assignment “The focus of this digital humanities experiment is on the design of the project, rather than on the completeness or perfection of its execution. You will be evaluated on how well you collaborate, involve each member of the group, outline your research question and methodology, and “test out” an alternative methodology for the literary analysis of an environmental question or problem.” Feb. 1st: Research question + methodology posted on blog Feb. 15th: Progress report in class March 1st: “Final” project uploaded to blog
Neuromancer: Discussion Threads • Cyberpunk • Geographies: Urban / outer / cyber spaces? Imagining the end of nature? • “The meat”: Embodiment, materiality + the environmental upshot of posthumanism
The Novel Schematized Technologies Decks Prostheses Nerve slicing Eye replacements Polycarbon suits Simstim Sense / Net ICE/ icebreaker Geographies The sprawl Tokyo (Chiba – Ninsei) Freeside / Zion Villa Straylight Cyberspace The matrix Characters Case, Molly (razor girl), Armitage/Colonel Corto, Peter Riviera, Julius Deane, Linda Lee, The Finn, Maelcum, Dixie Flatline/McCoy Pauley, Panther Moderns, Lady 3Jane / Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool, Wintermute AI, Neuromancer AI
Covers for Neuromancer (2000, 2004) Posters for planned film adaptation of novel 1. Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk’s Archetypes “Cyberpunk constitutes a kind of laboratory experiment in which the geographic-cultural light spectrum and bandwidths of the new system are registered. It is a literature of the stereotypes thrown up by a system in full expansion, which [. . .] sends out a variety of uncharted signals and signs of nascent communities and new and artificially differentiated ethnies.” (107) - Fredric Jameson, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization” (2003)
Gibson’s Tokyo "Tokyo has been my handiest prop shop for as long as I've been writing: sheer eye candy. You can see more chronological strata of futuristic design in a Tokyo streetscape than anywhere else in the world.” -Gibson, “My Own Private Tokyo,” 2001 "Tonight, watching the Japanese do what they do here, amid all this electric kitsch, all this randomly overlapped media, this chaotically stable neon storm of marketing hoopla, I've got my answer: Japan is still the future.” -Gibson, “My Own Private Tokyo,” 2001
2. Geographies: Urban / outer / cyber space “The sheer material expansiveness of the metropolis, which in Neuromancer extends even into the extra-terrestrial orbit of Freeside [. . .] is matched in another sense by the ubiquity of urban experience. It is this that [Fredric] Jameson has in mind when he remarks upon the complementary ‘disappearance of Nature.’” (Myers 890) - Tony Myers, “The Postmodern Imaginary in Neuromancer,” MFS (2001)
