1st Edition

Cyberpunk and Visual Culture

Edited By Graham Murphy, Lars Schmeink Copyright 2018
    326 Pages
    by Routledge

    326 Pages
    by Routledge

    Within the expansive mediascape of the 1980s and 1990s, cyberpunk’s aesthetics took firm root, relying heavily on visual motifs for its near-future splendor saturated in media technologies, both real and fictitious. As today’s realities look increasingly like the futures forecast in science fiction, cyberpunk speaks to our contemporary moment and as a cultural formation dominates our 21st century techno-digital landscapes.

    The 15 essays gathered in this volume engage the social and cultural changes that define and address the visual language and aesthetic repertoire of cyberpunk – from cybernetic organisms to light, energy, and data flows, from video screens to cityscapes, from the vibrant energy of today’s video games to the visual hues of comic book panels, and more. Cyberpunk and Visual Culture provides critical analysis, close readings, and aesthetic interpretations of exactly those visual elements that define cyberpunk today, moving beyond the limitations of merely printed text to also focus on the meaningfulness of images, forms, and compositions that are the heart and lifeblood of cyberpunk graphic novels, films, television shows, and video games.

    Scott Bukatman

    Foreword: Cyberpunk and its Visual Vicissitudes

    Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink

    Introduction: The Visuality and Virtuality of Cyberpunk

     

    I: "Image/Text Concatenations"; or, From Literary to Visual Cyberpunk (and back again)

    1. Christian Hviid Mortensen 
      Beyond the Heroics of Gonzo-Journalism in Transmetropolitan    
    2. Timothy Wilcox 
      Embodying Failures of the Imagination: Defending the Posthuman in The Surrogates
    3. Graham J. Murphy 
      Cyberpunk Urbanism and Subnatural Bugs in BOOM! Studios’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
    4.  

    5. Stina Attebery and Josh Pearson 
      "Today's Cyborg is Stylish": The Humanity Cost of Posthuman Fashion in Cyberpunk 2020  
    6. Pawel Frelik 
      "Silhouettes of Strange Illuminated Mannequins": Cyberpunk’s Incarnations of Light

    7. II: "Tactics of Visualization"; or, From Visual to Virtual Cyberpunk (and back again)

    8. Christopher McGunnigle 
    9. "My Targeting System is a Little Messed Up": The Cyborg Gaze in the RoboCop Media Franchise 

    10. Ryan J. Cox 
      Kusanagi’s Body: Dualism and the Performance of Identity in Ghost in the Shell and Stand Alone Complex
    11. Mark R. Johnson 
      The History of Cyberspace Aesthetics in Video Games   
    12. Stephen Joyce 
      Playing for Virtually Real: Cyberpunk Aesthetics and Ethics in Deus Ex: Human Revolution
    13. Jenna Ng and Jamie Macdonald 
      "We Are Data": The Cyberpunk Imaginary of Data Worlds in Watch Dogs  

    14. III: "Emerging World Orders"; or, Cyberpunk as Science Fiction Realism 

    15. Evan Torner
    16. 1980s German Cyberpunk Cinema: Kamikaze 1989 and Nuclearvision

    17. Mark Bould 
      Afrocyberpunk Cinema: The Postcolony Finds its own Use for Things   
    18. Anna McFarlane 
      Cyberpunk and "Science Fiction Realism" in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and Zero Dark Thirty
    19.         

    20. Sherryl Vint 
      Cyberwar: The Convergence of Virtual and Material Battlefields in Cyberpunk Cinema 
    21. Lars Schmeink
      Afterthoughts: Cyberpunk Engagements with Countervisuality

    Biography

    Graham J. Murphy is Professor with the School of English and Liberal Studies (Faculty of Business) at Seneca College (Toronto). He co-edited Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives with Sherryl Vint (2010), co-authored Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion with Susan M. Bernardo (2006), and authored several articles that have appeared in numerous anthologies and peer-review journals. He is an Associate Editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and sits on the editorial advisory boards of both Science Fiction Studies and Extrapolation.

    Lars Schmeink is Professor of Media Studies at the Institut für Kultur- und Medienmanagement, Hochschule für Musik und Theater (Hamburg) and is currently the president of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (Association for Research in the Fantastic). He is the German section editor for media in the Open Library of the Humanities, the author of Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science Fiction (2016), and has published in Science Fiction Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television and Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts.

    "Since its inception, cyberpunk has been haunted by the notion that it represents only a very brief moment of the science fictional imagination, a moment which quickly passed. Murphy and Schmeink's smart collection proves the opposite is true: cyberpunk never ended, and in fact its vast transmedia landscape of images, icons, visual artifacts, and technological apparatuses has completely taken over our world." -Gerry Canavan, Marquette University

    "The report of cyberpunk’s death was an exaggeration, clearly, as the essays in this vibrant collection demonstrate. The ambiguities, complexities and excitements of this intermedial genre are explored here in riveting detail: the legacy of Gibson’s ‘lines of light’ are demonstrated to be, indeed, unthinkably complex." -Stacy Gillis, Newcastle University

    "In addition to offering the fullest documentation to date of the range of visual media infiltrated by and responsive to the cyberpunk aesthetic, this collection offers bold new arguments about the relation between print and visual narratives and the convergent, cross-media character of contemporary science fiction in general." -Thomas Foster, University of Washington

    "This collection demonstrates the breadth and depth of the subgenre through intriguing and accessible essays on the diversity of cyberpunk media, offering unique and important new arguments about the visuality of cyberpunk." - Kathryn E. Heffner, University of Iowa, in FOUNDATION: The International Review of Science Fiction

    "Murphy and Schmeink’s edited collection of 15 essays commendably engages with a profusion of media formats to highlight the visual styles iconic to Cyberpunk and argue for the centrality of such aesthetic paradigms within contemporary ‘realistic’ settings. Through this targeted focus the selected chapters exhibit a coherence of thought and criticism that is often lost within other broader collections, marking this title as both an important contribution to critical debate and companion to our current Cyberpunk-inflected times.“- Kerry Dodd, in SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 243–47