zeph’s pop culture quiz #59 A gentleman in striped pants, black jacket, white shirt, and black leather gloves investigates a sign laid out on a forest floor. The sign is composed of twigs and stones—but the question is: what is the profession of the person who laid out the sign? Simply leave a comment with your educated guess—you can ask for additional hints, too. [Leaving a comment is easy; just click the ‘Leave a reply’ at the end of the post and fill in the form. If it’s the first time you post a comment, it will be … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: October 2013
[Jake Rossen:] Where do you think the comic strip fits in today’s culture? [↑Bill Watterson:] Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world … Continue reading
Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for? ↑FRENAY, JEAN-PAUL. 2009. ↑Artificial Paradise, Inc. [short film]. Brussels: Condor, Jean-Paul Frenay. via ↑entry at ↑posthuman blues … Continue reading
That juxtaposition of technology and humanity is a key theme of the cyberpunk movement […] (Brown 2011) When Synners [Cadigan 1991] was published, the World Wide Web didn’t exist; few people had access to computers for leisure use; virtual reality hadn’t made it out of the labs. Yet Cadigan wrote, with typical assurance, of a noisy, noirish, dystopian future, of characters overwhelmed by sheer noise (physical and mental), of a plethora of information conveyed in media old and new, of the breakdown of the body/technology boundary. The world of Synners feels (un)comfortably familiar from the vantage point of the present … Continue reading