On the Edge of the Re(lation)al: Between and Beyond Cyber Realities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Futures, 1994
The relation between humans and machines has come to assume a central place within the social sciences, particularly in debates about the role of science and about information technologies. Cyberculture plays a key role in these debates, drawing its inspiration in large part from virtual reality systems. This article examines the affinities between two aspects of cyberculture: cyborg post-modernism, which revolves around the notion that the boundaries between humans and machines are becoming irretrievably blurred, and the cyberpunk movement within youth culture with its futuristic ideas about information and communication machines.
Futures, 1994
The relation between humans and machines has come to assume a central place within the social sciences, particularly in debates about the role of science and about information technologies. Cyberculture plays a key role in these debates, drawing its inspiration in large part from virtual reality systems. This article examines the affinities between two aspects of cyberculture: cyborg post-modernism, which revolves around the notion that the boundaries between humans and machines are becoming irretrievably blurred, and the cyberpunk movement within youth culture with its futuristic ideas about information and communication machines.
Visions of Excess: Cyberspace, digital technologies and new cultural politics
"This paper critically situates contemporary concerns with cyberspace and digital media within a cultural dimension. In doing this it sets the emerging new communication technologies alongside issues of cultural limits and boundaries. The paper begins by undertaking ground clearing work about the nature of cyberspace and providing an analytical index of its position in relation to its imaginary or real status. It is argued that cyberspace is destined to attract two competing responses; first for being too true to life; and second for not being true enough. It is argued that these tensions are part of the cyberspatial embodiment of certain significant cultural aesthetics which are subsequently interwoven into the fabric of popular technoculture. This embodiment projects a number of competing claims and characterisations for the potential of digital media through slogans of cyberspace. The paper addresses how spatial metaphors, forms of technological enhancement, Utopian aesthetics, technoculture and posthuman philosophy are framed as 'frontier discourse'. The materialism of transhumanist and extroprian politics is examined from a phenomenological standpoint. These frontier projects posit a 'disclosing space' for digital media which offer a radical 'crossing over' from the human to nonhuman computer mediated environment. By way of phenomenological analysis these new cultural politics are shown to be intimations of the real and an illusion of radical otherness which is chimerical and exemplary of unreflexive 'modes of becoming'."
Going Virtual -But How? Mapping Virtualities in Contemporary Technoculture: Foreword
Going Virtual -But How? Mapping Virtualities in Contemporary Technoculture, 2023
The increased availability and usage of immersive devices, together with futuristic narratives promoted by technology and media "gurus" and entrepreneurs, has encouraged a strong revival of the notion of virtuality. At first sight, this notion appears straightforward, and its application clearly connected to specific objects and phenomena of our time. On closer inspection, however, confusion starts to arise. The concept of virtuality is still in need of in-depth critical examination. The challenge is not much solving highly specific thematic or terminological matters; but rather addressing them while considering their wider frame and background, so that the richness of the virtual is not neglected or depleted. This issue of Aisthesis aims at providing the ground precisely for such an attempt, by gathering contributions with multifarious angles and scope, yet unified by the awareness of the intricacies of "going virtual" today.
The End of the Virtual : Digital Methods
2009
Arguably, there is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are "born" in the new medium, as opposed to those that have "migrated" to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with "virtual methods" that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-à-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, I propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. I will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, I propose a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term "online groundedness." The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods. To date the methods employed in Internet research have served the purpose of critiquing the persistent idea of the Internet as a virtual realm apart. Such thinking arose from the discourse surrounding virtual reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Internet came to stand for a virtual realm, with opportunities for a redefinition of consciousness, identity, corporality, community, citizenry and (social movement) politics. 1 Indeed, in 1999 in one of the first efforts to synthesize Internet research, the communications scholar, Steve Jones invited researchers to move beyond the perspective of the Internet as a realm apart, and opened the discussion of method. 2 How would social scientists study the Internet, if they were not to rely on the approaches associated with it to date: human-computer interaction,
The Digital Space between Virtuality and Materiality
2021
This paper is a review of the XIX MAGIS International Film and Media Studies Spring School and focuses on some of the topics that were at the centre of different talks: virtual reality, materiality and immateriality, and the notion of medium. Those themes are considered in a media-ecological and media-archaeological framework. In addition, some of the conceptual tools proposed in the talks are being used for reflecting upon the special context in which this edition of the MAGIS Spring School happened.