Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self

The International Journal of the Image, 2013

Merleau-Ponty argues that perception is not merely the passive reception of visual data but an embodied, imaginative, and transformative experience. What is transformed through embodied perception is the perceiver of the world and the world perceived, in short our sense of reality. From this we can imagine the world as being fundamentally abstract, artificial and manipulable. This obviously raises questions about the nature of the realm of the material, of what we might call concrete reality. For design this appears untenable for though the perception of the world as-it-might-be functions on an abstract level, the changes we make are based upon our embodied experience of the world as-weperceive-it. These changes then become operational at an apparent material, concrete, level. As design activity is concerned with transforming the world, quite literally in material form, this leads to design being imagined as the creation of the artificial world. In this paper I seek firstly to draw upon these parallel concerns with the imaginative and the artificial by examining the central role that the image plays in both. I will specifically interrogate the nature of the images of design and argue that because they are largely technical and increasingly ubiquitous-that is they are available to anyone with a camera phone, a computer and design software-that we are witnessing the erasure of the imaginary by the image. I will conclude by speculating on how we might resist such conditions.

The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even bey...

Art Inquiry, 2020

I analyse five forms of images: electronic, digital, interactive, networked and living, all of which challenge traditional descriptions and expectations. I analyse them from the technical-ontological, phenomenological and cultural perspective to demonstrate different ways in which they discuss and deconstruct the notion of an image. Finally, I try to propose a new context for understanding the discussed forms of new imagery, i.e. the context of post-imagery.

Arts

Our future effects on the earth, in light of the Anthropocene, are all dire expressions of a depleted world left in piles of detritus and toxic ruin—including the diminished human as an assemblage of impoverished existence, yet adumbrating that handicapped existence with an ersatz advanced technology. In the cyberpunk films, these expressions are primarily visual expressions—whether through written prose thick with densely dark adjectives describing the world of cyberpunk, or more widely known, the comic books and films of cyberpunk, whose representations have become classically understood as SF canon. The new films of the cyberpunk redux however, represent an evolution in cyberpunk visuality. Despite these debatable issues around this term, it will provide this paper with its primary object of visuality, that of the “rich sight”, a further term that arose from the allure created in the late 19th century development of department stores that innovated the display of the goods laid o...

2018

This paper explores how photography reconfigures the lifeworld, augmenting or displacing its perceptual character. To various degrees, theorists of photography since Walter Benjamin and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s and 30s to Vilem Flusser in the 1980s and the post-photography theorists of today have argued that the technical image transcends human perception and intentionality. In a world conditioned by the photographic apparatus, even more so in the age of the networked and algorithmic image, space and time turn from being fundamental facticities of experience and become instead, at the extreme, mere simulacra. What is at stake are the spatiality and temporality of a world in which the embodied subject of perception lives. At several points in his writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty critiques photography on the basis that it replaces the spatial and temporal horizon of embodied human experience with a static and mechanical frame. His criticism echoes and is clearly founded upon Edm...

"We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's informatio explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neurosciences to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis. The goal is to expand visual competence in investigating new visual worlds and to build cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences. About the Author"

Thanks to its scope and associative power, the Web has become a new channel not only to release art projects, but also to make them viable in terms of production: both as producer (which allows the interactive creation and building of an opened art work) or as the disseminator of the message to be broadcasted. Part of the artistic production on the Web, unlike literature, theatre, and film, cannot be transferred to another means of communication without losing its primary characteristic: certain "products" only have a place in cyberspace. Nonetheless its dynamics are influencing all other means. With this in mind, artistic production -digital and contemporary -will be analysed considering the perspective of Nicolas Bourriaud, who considers the artist, Web surfer, and intellectual in the beginning of the third millennium as a "semionauta." The analysis will be focused on what the author calls "postproduction" and "relational aesthetics," and further concepts like "road map" and "deejaying," coined by him. Earlier references like Marcel Duchamp (ready-mades) and Andy Warhol (serial production and consumption: from the museum to the supermarket) compose an illustrative theoretical framework. Basically, the debate will be the reason why contemporary art involves a constant process of deconstruction / reconstruction. A process of recreation, even if the raw material is original, since there is already a base to create from (although it is not structured). The registered reality is re-built, or rather the fragments of this cropped reality. It is possible to change its order and narrative, its times and spaces. In the postproduction process, this fragmented reality will be manipulated and, inevitably, reframed. It could even contradict itself, denying its essence. As levels of manipulation are endless, neither do those of redefinition. Instead of questioning about where we are going, it would be better trying to identify where we are.

1998

not work independently of one another but together syntheticallyjust as the body is therefore re-made so too must the signs which refer to it be re-designed in function. Thus, change in the structure of power operates flush with change in the perceptual system; shifts to more sophisticated modes of participative control are mapped by the response of a more susceptible body ("nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls or communicating vessels" 15) Participation here is taken to be far more than a communicative dialogue between image and spectator, subject and object. It is understood as a process of dismantling -a fully integrative, Spinozist16 plane of parts and indefinable wholes. It is an opening of the organism to new arrangements, surfaces and biotic components which Baudrillard refers to as the "cold, communicational, contactual, motivational obscenity of today. "" The exact nature of such participation or reciprocity will, of course, continue to be a working problemonly specifically exemplified in the context of material examples. However, the shift from the managed perception of Debord to the intensive perception of Deleuze-Guattari can be assumed to involve radical changes in levels of attention, stimulation, distraction and shock. Each of these terms will gain clarity when treated as cybernetic process in the context of a Debord -Baudrillard -Deleuze trajectory which maps the adaptation of the organism to non-homeostatic environments constituted by image bombardment and intensive sensory intrusion. The standardised perception, suppressed excitation and absent nervous system of the `society of the spectacle' is then seen to be superseded by the perceptual events of techno-capitalism which typify a socius increasingly saturated by sensory inputs and stimuli-response circuits operating in advance of themselves, indicating a new state of a body held in suspense. These are shifts which can only be accounted for by a careful analysis of how the image treats the body, of how the spectacle treats the State in the period of post-Debordian analysis. With the emergence of the cybernetic image, our response changes; "No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking, but this state of terror proper to 15 Delcuze and Guattari -A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 153 16 see chapter 4 for full explanation of the use of this term " Baudrillard. J. -'The Ecstacy of Commmunication' in Foster. H. (Ed. ) -The Anti-Aesthetic, (Bay Press, 1993) p. 131 '° As Plant (1992: 36) notes "Whereas I)chord argued that commodities circulate almost solely for the sake of abstract buying and selling, Baudrillard gradually removed all sense of the `almost' and claimed that commodities have become pure signs which no longer even pretend to point to anything real... " '° Baudrillard. J. -'Requiem for the Media' in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, (St. Louis, Telos, 1981) p. 182

Annual Review of Sociology, 1992

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age, 2019

The image of thought, indeed thought ‘itself’ has endured a long and somewhat tedious history, with debates circling around the role of representation, reason and rationality.3 Those debates have often infected the very terrain of the photograph (and, for that matter, image) and have done so to such a degree that often image is either presented as the metaphysical god-fairy of the photograph, with the latter acting as documentation for, or representation of, the former; or, as more recently the case, where skill inherent in the world of imaging is left to one side or ignored altogether. This chapter will offer a completely different approach. It begins by staging a minor narrative of our contemporary world in the form of ‘Alexa’. It then double-strands that narrative with, on the one hand, an interlacing of Newtonian physics, modern political thought and the importance of ‘exit[ing]’ for the material-conceptual development and inhabiting of what it means to be human – and indeed, what society might become, in the best sense of community, possibility, invention, democracy. On the other hand, it draws upon an interlacing of post-Newtonian physics, big data, artificial intelligence and the importance of ‘encounter[ing]’ in order to develop a wholly different picture of what it means or could mean to be human, and with it, what it means or could mean (ethically, politically, democratically, substantially) to be alive in this wildly shifting world of bots, conceptually activated vectors, multidimensional time warps. The chapter ends with a provocation: that these double-strands have something in common. It is the quiet, but no less peculiar, use of an old logical tool called the counterfactual, an alt-objective x from which the entirety of the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and/or political scaffolding unfolds.In the former case, that is, in the pre-information age of industrial capitalism ‘case’, one could name (and did name) this counterfactual ‘the state of nature.’ In a postmodern age of complexity, derivatives, big data, distributed and artificial intelligence, that is, the post-Newtonian, neo-liberalist ‘case’, that counterfactual could be named, and is named: the photograph.