Description
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.
Table of Contents
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)
- Christian Hviid Mortensen
Beyond the Heroics of Gonzo-Journalism in Transmetropolitan - Timothy Wilcox
Embodying Failures of the Imagination: Defending the Posthuman in The Surrogates - Graham J. Murphy
Cyberpunk Urbanism and Subnatural Bugs in BOOM! Studios’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Stina Attebery and Josh Pearson
"Today's Cyborg is Stylish": The Humanity Cost of Posthuman Fashion in Cyberpunk 2020 - Pawel Frelik
"Silhouettes of Strange Illuminated Mannequins": Cyberpunk’s Incarnations of Light - Christopher McGunnigle
- Ryan J. Cox
Kusanagi’s Body: Dualism and the Performance of Identity in Ghost in the Shell and Stand Alone Complex - Mark R. Johnson
The History of Cyberspace Aesthetics in Video Games - Stephen Joyce
Playing for Virtually Real: Cyberpunk Aesthetics and Ethics in Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Jenna Ng and Jamie Macdonald
"We Are Data": The Cyberpunk Imaginary of Data Worlds in Watch Dogs - Evan Torner
- Mark Bould
Afrocyberpunk Cinema: The Postcolony Finds its own Use for Things - Anna McFarlane
Cyberpunk and "Science Fiction Realism" in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and Zero Dark Thirty - Sherryl Vint
Cyberwar: The Convergence of Virtual and Material Battlefields in Cyberpunk Cinema - Lars Schmeink
Afterthoughts: Cyberpunk Engagements with Countervisuality
II: "Tactics of Visualization"; or, From Visual to Virtual Cyberpunk (and back again)
"My Targeting System is a Little Messed Up": The Cyborg Gaze in the RoboCop Media Franchise
III: "Emerging World Orders"; or, Cyberpunk as Science Fiction Realism
1980s German Cyberpunk Cinema: Kamikaze 1989 and Nuclearvision
