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Chapter Seven: A Cultural Response "Science fiction, like Bohemia, is a useful place to put a wide variety of people, where their ideas and actions can be examined without the risk of putting those ideas and actions directly into wider practice. Bohemia has served this function since its start in the early Industrial Revolution, and the wisdom of this scheme should be admitted."(2) As seen in Chapter III, fiction, suitably achieved, serves as an excellent vehicle for intelligent conjecture. Unburdened by the logistics of developing the necessary hardware; leapfrogging the constraints of still young technologies with all the tedious aspects of their gradual implementation, science fiction writers have long envisualised the concepts and possibilities that may be waiting out there in Cyberspace. After all, John Train's classic indictment of the ICA's 6-7th April 1991 Virtual Reality conference; "The future is being re-inscribed before the fact"(3), is aimed at a fairly wide target, and also a useful handle on the Science Fiction genre. Within science fiction lurks a semi-underground movement that originally emerged as a genre product of the 1980s, now attracting controversy over its proper definition. The argument seems to emerge from a bifurcation.... Aesthetic Versus Pragmatic 'CYBERPUNK' has emerged as a style, even a fashion, but also as an attitude, and perhaps a modus operandi for living in what is, despite recent thawings of the cold war, a bleak future, where cynicism often takes over as an antidote to the vacuum that life inside the technology of the 20th Century can leave in the mind. Whilst it offers a solution to the problems of using and handling technology, it has evolved and retains a distinctive aesthetic. (Figs.35, 35a, 36) Tangible trademarks are nihilism, black leather, mirrored shades, filth and neon, the subversive, often violent use of technology current and future; preferably the latter. In particular, the reader is directed to the works of writers such as William Gibson; J G Ballard; Bruce Sterling..... "...there is no rigid formula, but many cyberpunk stories are set in a relatively near post-industrial, multicultural future in which electronic and bio-technology have saturated all forms of experience -- become an inescapable environment, a technosphere.....often a hard-boiled tech noir, technosleaze, retrofitted future...high-tech but dingy, the cyberpunk future usually is a time of electronic and medical marvels, but also of vaguely post-apocalyptic rubble.....high culture - the arts - seems pretty much dead and pop culture has taken over."(4) A useful way to gain a feel for the approach is to examine how these distinctive elements & figures of speech have been anticipated by recent film and video. Cyberpunk is the child of the state of mind that has brought us works such as the following, among numerous others : A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Fig. 37) "....velcro and video games have changed our world much more than has spaceflight....drugs and rock music are as much a part of hightech as are computers...Cyberpunks....are perhaps the first generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction, but in a truly science fictional world"(5) In seeking a plausible future extension of this SF world we supposedly live in, the cyberpunk firmly rejects other subgenres. There is no place for the 'galactic empire', or the 'epic tale of sword and scorcery'. In the cyberpunk future, the likes of Dan Dare, Flash Gordon or The Hobbit would find themselves ill-equipped to survive. "Interest in outer space has waned and the inner-spaces of computers and the human body have become the new frontiers and the new battlegrounds...a fast-forward future so culturally complicated and technologically determined that no individual can do much more than survive...."(6) On the basis of the above, it might be argued that Cyberpunk is merely a niche carved out of a literary genre, or a new set of clothes for old structures, but the more realistic speculations about the ascent of silicon and all its implications bear close resemblance to what is already starting to happen. "Until the advent of the printing press, the dispersal of information was a very small-scale affair, restricted to the various elites (religious, governmental, financial, etc.) However, with the large scale of printed material, information became a more readily available resource that even the average population could obtain...."(7) Information has evolved from being the sacred preserve of centuries past into resembling a street commodity at street prices. As noted in Chapter IV, on a global scale, the vast majority of financial transactions are now electronic. In his novels, Gibson suggests that cash will in future become illegal.....today, credit cards breed like bacteria, and electronic fraud is commonplace. The recently published book "CYBERPUNK"(8) charts the case histories of notable computer hackers, who have adopted the moniker 'cyberpunk' as their own, doubtless identifying with the attitudes it evokes. The hacker is technically a criminal; self-styled antihero of the electronic age, steadily becoming a ubiquity - patched into the computer networks through the personal terminal and modem; whether vandalising institutional data banks, leaving mocking messages; digital graffiti, altering records for personal ends, else stealing/copying restricted information and escaping with the loot in the form of a floppy disk. "The cyberpunk genre.....is often accused of ignoring ethics. Of being too excited with new technology to see the potential dangers...... many of us are in fact concerned with the morality of high technology......the concensus seems to be that ethics are crucial but they must not simply serve as an excuse to stop progress."(9) This seems to imply that a growing percentage of the population is already taking the latest technology on board, not only using, embracing it, but abusing it, whilst others may find themselves the subject of that abuse in a process which sidesteps questions of morality in the sake of exploration. As a function of the relative ease of global communication, travel and availability of information, culture appears subject to the same phenomena of convergence as technology, and the Cyberpunk genre is a good example of cross-fertilization between fiction, reality and conjecture. At present, the more sensational ideas that VR is provoking exist only as speculation. My introduction opened with a quote to the effect that VR has become available before it is academically understood. On the basis of the above, culture might well have supplied its own answers; and failing answers, an attitude, long anticipated and developed through areas like fiction, by the time VR becomes, as some suggest, a widespread event. References (1) Hawking, Stephen W, 'A Brief History Of Time' , Guild Publ, London, 1988, pp167-168 |