writing culture and cyberpunk

xirdalium Posted on by

The picture is a clipping from a photography by Martha G. Tyler, which served as a frontispiece in 'Writing Culture' (Clifford & Marcus 1986). It shows 'Stephen Tyler in the field,' concentrated on his writing, looking away from the world, and shielding his eyes from the light by a kerchief stuffed beneath the earpiece of his matte black mirrorshades.

The above picture is a clipping from a photography by Martha G. Tyler, which served as a frontispiece in ‘Writing Culture’ (↵Clifford & Marcus 1986). It shows ‘↑Stephen Tyler in the field’, concentrated on his writing, looking away from the world, and shielding his eyes from the light by a kerchief stuffed beneath the earpiece of his ↵matte black mirrorshades ;-)

↑Evans-Pritchard allegedly once voiced that anthropology was not so much a science, but an art. ↑Hortense Powdermaker stated that the anthropologist had no instrument, that she was her instrument herself. She did not think in terms of measuring instruments, but had musical instruments on her mind. The anthropologist has to tune herself until she is in resonance with the people she strives to understand. With ‘Writing Culture’ (↵Clifford & Marcus 1986) the critique of ethnographic practice, a critique which developed since the 1960s, culminated. But ‘Writing Culture’ was more than ‘the mere demystification of past dominant conventions of representations. Rather, such a critique legitimates experimentation and a search for options in research and writing activity’. (↵Marcus 1986: 263) Experimentation and a diversity of writing projects was encouraged. The unveiling of ethnographies as being tales, narratives, literature, even fiction in a way, encouraged anthropologists to self-consciously produce exactly that. The call was to transgress ‘conservative exercise’ and ‘straightforward analytical and descriptive account[s] from fieldwork’. (↵Marcus 1986: 265) It was a challenge to produce literature. A special kind of literature, a new genre, the post-modern ethnography—its literary-ness most radically described by Stephen Tyler:

A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect. It is, in a word, poetry—not in its textual form, but in its return to the original context and function of poetry, which, by means of its performative break with everyday speech, evoked memories of the ethos of the community and thereby provoked hearers to act ethically. (↵Tyler 1986: 125-126)
    No, it [post-modern ethnography] is not surrealism. It is the realism of the commonsense world, which is only surreal in the fictions of science and in the science of fiction. (↵Tyler 1986: 137)
    An ethnography is a fantasy, but it is not, like these, a fiction, for the idea of fiction entails a locus of judgement outside the fiction, whereas an ethnography weaves a locus of judgement within itself, and that locus, that evocation of reality, is also a fantasy. (↵Tyler 1986: 139)

Cyberpunk literature and movies are works of fiction, but not of science fiction in the ordinary sense. They are a form of social critique in the shape of noir tales and narratives of dystopian near-futures, “typically drawn from what the authors consider to be the logical outcomes of present day”. (↵Collins 2002: 97)

Cyberpunk’s ‘credible’ near-futures are recognizably extrapolated from those present trends that reflect the current corporate monopoly on power and wealth: the magnification of the twotier society, the technocolonization of the body, the escalation of the pace of ecological collapse, and the erosion of civil society, public space, popular democracy, and the labor movement (Ross 1991: 152, cf. ↵Collins 2002: 97).

There is a canon of central themes always resurfacing in cyberpunk texts. The most striking is the relationship between humans and technology, the impact of technology on society, culture, and humankind at large, up to the fusion of human and machine, the ‘technocolonisation’ of the body, by means of genetics and cybernetics, which poses the question “What is human?” ever anew.
    It is supposed that the continual spread and access to information is of crucial importance for the ongoings within the contemporary world, culminating to a blurring of the virtual with the real. Hence particularly media and surveillance technologies, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are featured prominently, as speech and language are seen as the central dominating forces of control in society—society controlled by totalitarian elites, be they transnational corporations or nation-states, regardless of the latter being of socialist, capitalist, or any other coinage: “The technological devices used by the elite in cyberpunk are built primarily for the purpose of social control, and as such, the technology becomes a symbol of the loss of individual sovereignty.” (↵Collins 2004)

But cyberpunk always focusses on the underground of society, the perspective is always that of the oppressed. Within the sprawl, the living space of the urban populace, there are pockets of resistance, sub-worlds created within the oppressive system. Street-smart groups who fight the hyper-commercialised corporate oligarchy.
    Cyberpunk does not naively strive to expose the dangers of the growing technologisation of society, but decidedly stresses human creativity, the ability of culturally appropriating globally spreading technology, commodities, and ideas:

Technology in cyberpunk is also viewed as potentially liberating, however, and is often appropriated by the resistance movement to their own benefit […] the technology used by the resistance is often the cast-off older technology rather than the latest high-tech products […]. In light of the neophilia of consumerism, it is significant that the resistance does not choose (or cannot choose) the latest technology. The appropriation of older, particularly low technology for its use in the resistance is a theme running throughout cyberpunk […, see ↵lo tek nexus]. Cyberpunk, therefore, has an arguably ambiguous relationship to technology itself. It is often through the metaphor of technology that we are led to a realisation that it is not technology that is at fault, it is the way in which it has been employed that enslaves humankind. (↵Collins 2004)

‘The street finds its own uses for things.’—this aphorism by ↑William Gibson, the godfather of cyberpunk, not only contains the concept of cultural appropriation, but hints to another trait cyberpunk has in common with contemporary anthropology: The focus on the street-level, the grassroots, and everyday life. Where the real things happen.
    Accordingly ‘cyberpunk visuals, ideally, are dirty, hyper-realistic “lived in” looks at the near future.’ (↑Sfam 2006) But not only the social realities of urban decay, crime, violence and drug use are picked up as themes, but also contemporary society’s pervadedness by ‘low-culture’, mass or popular media items. There are countless references to popular culture within cyberpunk texts. Daniel Miller forcefully argued ‘that the study of consumption and commodities represents a major transformation in the discipline of anthropology.’ (↵Miller 1995: 141) Quite matching in ‘cyberpunk fiction commodity culture is integrated throughout the novel as it is in our everyday life.’ (↵Collins 2004)
    I am going to quote Tyler once more. Not merely to show that he has read ‘Neuromancer’ (↵Gibson 1984) [with ‘Neuromancer’ the cyberpunk-movement’s products started to be seen as forming a genre], but to state my disagreement with his opinion on cyberpunk as he voices it in ↑Vile Bodies—a mental machination (Tyler 1993):

This is not to say that the relatively dystopic present will be replaced by an absolutely dystopic future as envisioned by Gibson (1984) and other science fiction writers and film makers. These apocalyptic visions—in spite of their seeming departures from standard textualization and cinematography—are little more than bad digests of the Book of Revelations, including even its obscurities of emplotment and character motivation. They do not, in other words, portend innovative reflections of Cyborg sensitivity and sensibility; they are little more than predictable works of modernist transgression that, at best, merely repeat, with heavy-handed pretentiousness, the eschatology, the themes, and textual imperatives of the inventio they purport to transgress. The rhetoric of techno-science and of its redundant surrogate, science fiction, is boringly predictable.

To me a lot of elements and story-twists within cyberpunk literature is not ‘boringly predictable’ but frighteningly re-recognizable. The reader is confronted with well-known elements of everyday life and of the contemporary world at large. Extrapolated, brought to the point by hyperbole, but still all too well re-recognizable. Furthermore I re-recognize a plethora of issues sociocultural anthropology meanwhile has taken up—see above or ↵anthropology’s shades .
    Honestly, I do not get why Tyler takes cyberpunk to be boring—maybe due to a lack of ‘ethnographic tension’? According to the cyberpunk writers’ own testimony they were a ‘generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world.’ (↵Sterling 1986) They lived in the world they described, and especially in this world’s underground. They themselves were a part of the underground which so prominently is belaboured and interpreted in their works. Therefore their texts may well lack “ethnographic tension”—the tension which arises out of the ethnographer’s confrontation with the culturally non-understood.
    The ways of the writer-writer and of the writer-anthropologist are not the same, for sure, but close, and ultimately leading to similar goals: To an understanding of contemporary culture and society, and to critique. Quite naturally the cyberpunk-writer openly uses literary devices to achieve this goal. At the latest since ‘Writing Culture’ the anthropologist has to openly use literary devices as well—because they are inescapable.
    Like ethnography, cyberpunk is grounded upon the observation of the empirical world. The cyberpunk-writer’s observation and interpretation are not methodologically backed-up, like the anthropologist’s should be. They are the artist’s intuitive, and sometimes eclectical observation and interpretation. The artist’s attempt at getting in resonance with people, culture, and society.
    Still cyberpunk is fiction—but ethnography in a way as well. Nevertheless there are crucial differences, e.g. the author’s horizon of experience has not to be hidden within an ethnography. Powdermaker’s instrument has to be made visible, the reader must be enabled to follow every tune when the instrument is pitched anew. The people described within an ethnography have met the author—so shall the reader.
    Within his ‘Engaging Anthropology’ (↵Eriksen 2006) Thomas Hylland Eriksen has thought about the reader, too:

The philosopher A. R. Louch once infamously intimated that anthropology was just bad travel writing (Louch 1966); just as his near-namesake Edmund Leach once remarked that all anthropologists were failed novelists. Every self-respecting anthropologist would oppose this view and point out, perfectly reasonably, that anthropology raises the issues at hand in a much more accurate way than any travel writer would be able to, that it is by far more systematic and conscientious in its presentation of the events and statements of people that form the basis for generalisation, and so on. On the other hand, considering the professional skepticism of many contemporary anthropologists, who eschew the word ‘science’, relinquish explicit comparison and are disdainful of anything that smacks of human universals, a good travelogue might well pass for an ethnography today. In principle, that is; it does not seem to happen very often in practice.
    The scarcity of readable, personal, anthropological travelogues is puzzling. It seems that just as anthropologists excel in the study of other people’s rituals but are inept at organising and immersing themselves in their own rituals, and just as anthropologists have waxed lyrical about ‘narratives’ for two decades without offering many juicy narratives themselves, all the elements of the personal travelogue are present in the contemporary credo of post-positivist anthropology, yet they are rarely brought to fruitition. Contemporary social and cultural anthropology is anti-scientistic and concerned with positioning and reflexivity. […]
    Even the most personal monographs of recent years and in the English language, executed in a spirit of ‘experimental writing’ (pace Marcus and Fischer 1986) and often portraying only a handful of informants, tend to be peppered with jargon and metatheoretical discussions […].

Cyberpunk is engaged and its juicy. Let’s engage anthropology, and let’s write juicy narratives. Not quite cyberpunk—let’s write cyberanthropology.
    Let’s don ↵matte black mirrorshades and walk the path to the light.
 
Cyberpunk

Share

anthropology voight-kampff style

xirdalium Posted on by

Leon takes the Voight-Kampff test administered by Holden
 

Some nights ago I got a friend of mine, a hopeful young anthropologist, well sloshed and had him suffer some expert interrogation—sorry for the evening’s script’s mean psychological twists, pal ;-) Among some other things I squeezed out of him, he confessed that recently he had done some payed-for business anthropology assignments.

The handbook they gave him contained a heap of pages filled with questionnaires seemingly right out of “Notes and queries in anthropology”—from the pre-Rivers era he meant. Stated so quite vehemently, in fact. All of this reminded me, again, of Philip K. Dick’s ↵“Do androids dream of electrical sheep”, Ridley Scott’s ↑“Blade Runner”, based on the former, and the fictitious Voight-Kampff test in particular.

The movie “Blade Runner” deals with some profound philosophical questions which are right within anthropology’s core. E.g. What is human? Remember: “Anthropology. A discourse on human nature.” (↵Encyclopædia Britannica 1771: I, 327)

The story is set within a dystopian future: The blue planet is heavily polluted and hardly anymore feasible as humanity’s habitat. Therefore the better-off live off-world, in the colonies located on other planets. Only the unlucky, those who are not allowed to emigrate to the colonies because of biological or psychological ‘defects’, or those who have a job to do, remain back on Earth and rough it in the mega-cities.

Los Angeles has developed into an urban sprawl overtowered by Tyrrell Corporation’s pyramid, wherein the creator gods dwell. The Victor-von-Frankensteins finally have done it and have invented human-shaped synthetical organisms, androids, called “replicants” in the story. They are the ones who do the hands-on jobs, working as servants, labourers, prostitutes, and mercenaries.

Ironically replicants are not allowed on Earth. They have to stay at their assigned places, in mankind’s new paradises, the colonies, and it is forbidden for them to enter the man-made hell, polluted Mother Earth. But, driven by at first unknown motives, time and again groups of replicants escape from the colonies and undertake the risky journey to Earth. More often than not they have to commit homicides during their dary enterprise.

Enter the main protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), blade runner. The blade runners are a kind of freelance policemen whose job it is to hunt down escaped replicants on Earth and to “retire”, to kill them. A blade runner is paid per “skin job”—per succesful kill, that is. Less than a peon: a bounty hunter. A blade runner is a hangman, a killer. A butcher backed up by law and the public authorities. “A goddamn one-man slaughterhouse”—in the words of Deckard’s superior Bryant.

But the blade runners play a twinfold role—besides being executioners, they are examiners as well. Because before retiring a replicant it has to be made sure that she or he indeed is a replicant, and not a human being according to the then valid definition. As Tyrrell Corporation’s motto is “More human than human” this is not an easy task. Luckily, despite of Tyrrell’s ongoing efforts, replicants still lack one human capacity: empathy.

The social and not-so-social sciences, the humanities, and not-so-human-ities, and natural science jump in here and furnish the blade runners with a helpful tool—the Voight-Kampff test. Basically the test consists of two components: Carefully worded questions and statements designed to provoke emotional response, and a machine measuring biometric data like respiration, heart rate, ‘blush response’, and iris contraction. Weirdly enough the machine exhibits a human trait itself—it breathes. Syd Mead, who designed the machine [Mead is credited as ‘Visual Futurist’] describes its invention like this:
 
Syd Mead's production sketch of the Voight-Kampff machine
 

Ridley [Scott] drew a sketch of this machine, which he said was an exotic kind of lie detector, and it reads the iris’s contractions. When you lie, or are under stress, your iris tends to contract or expand. The Voight-Kampff machine would center on the pupil and the operator would have a full-screen enlarged picture of the iris. The machine would measure the contractions of the iris and put it on a graph or something.

Ridley wanted this machine to be fairly delicate, briefcase size, easily portable, but it also had to look very dangerous sitting on a desk, very threatening, and sort of like a giant tarantula. Since it isn’t dangerous because it’s large, it had to be dangerous because it’s threatening. So we decided it should breathe. My rationale for this was that the machine would draw in air samples in the immediate area. When you are scared or apprehensive, our body gives off an odor. And I think it’s minute molecular detachments of protein or something that your sweat glands give out. So your chemistry changes when you’re tense. You unfold the machine and it starts itself as soon as the subject walks in the room; its arm moves around and focuses at the subject’s eye. It’s sort of alive in a way all by itself, and its very, very threatening.

In the end the Voight-Kampff test is a retro-hi-tech supported interview, designed to find out if an individual is human or not by determining if there is ‘enough’ emotional response. According to Deckard for an experienced blade runner it takes 20 to 30 cross-referenced questions to determine if a subject is human or not. All that is positivism and reductionism at its best.

It’s a little far-fetched, agreed, but in a way the Voight-Kampff test and the prominent role it plays within the Blade-Runner story, is a critique of anthropological methods of old. Of course the profession nowadays shuns away from these methods and deems them having been gravely ill-advised. On the other hand, what my young friend has told me about the realities of contemporary commercial business anthropology … it’s astounding where retro pops up as a fashion. Goes quite well with cyberpunk’s retro-futurism.

Now compare the Voight-Kampff test to seemingly common practice within contemporary market-research business anthropology: Two-day participant observation, backed up by naïve questionnaires. It’s not only grand extrapolations based upon paper-thin empirical data, but methodology neglecting the human condition. Someone lacks empathy here.

During the next winter term I will teach a seminar called “cyberpunk”, I guess. During the first session “Blade Runner” will be screened, and afterwards there will be a discussion on the movie’s philosophical and anthropological implications, on anthropologists not being blade runners or bounty hunters, or raiders of the lost arc, on us not interrogating people law-enforcement style, on us not being detectives or ↑counter-insurgents. Instead I want to convey the message—and have it discussed—that we are more ↵kin to cyberpunk-writers who exactly criticize all the aforementioned.

In the end filling someone up with booze, while simultaneously filling up oneself, is a far better method for gaining information and understanding. Natural conversations develope quite easily.

↵Out of our minds.
 

A close-up of the Voight-Kampff machine
 

Share

online communities

xirdalium Posted on by

Online communities
 

Now the website of my seminar ↑Onlinegemeinschaften [online communities] is online as well. Here’s the seminar’s English abstract:
 

The Internetinfrastructure is the basis for a whole range of sevices (like e.g. www, e-mail, IRC, IM, P2P, Usenet, ftp, etc.). This “new media”—mediators unknown before—do not only enable communication, but especially interpersonal and social interaction. If said interaction reaches a certain density, if the familiarity and mutual trust among the members of a group grows beyond a certain point, then something akin to social structure and culture begins to emerge—things anthropologists are interested in. Compared to the traditional “objects” of sociocultural anthropology and other academical disciplines dealing with culture and society, groups which are formating via electronic media are a relatively young phenomenon. In the first instance the seminar intends to give an idea of online-community. Subsequently the specifical strengths of sociocultural anthropology to understand online-community will be elaborated.
Share

stability online

xirdalium Posted on by

The real virtual
 

The final draft of my paper ↑The stability of cyberspace [.pdf | 32KB], which will be published—this month, they say—in the Proceedings of the ↑Cyberspace 2005 Conference, is now online. If you’re interested, help yourself and consider the thing to be CC-licenced—same licence as this blog has. Here’s the paper’s somewhat self-aggrandizing and preposterous—blame my youthful levity—abstract:
 

The lack of a suitable understanding of reality experienced by human beings hampers the discourse on social and cultural phenoma triggered by information and communication technologies (ICTs). This lack generates misunderstandings which accumulate in the notion of ICT-induced realms as a Gegenwelt, either in the form of an utopia or dystopia. The majority of the studies so far on the subject suffer from an utter lack of clarity of the discourse’s ever-resurfacing core-concepts “virtual reality” (VR), “cyberspace”, and “virtual community”. In fact, throughout the literature a shared understanding of these concepts does not exist.

From a sociocultural anthropological background this article provides a model of the experience of reality, which is based upon the works of William James and Alfred Schütz, and thereby bridges the divide between positivism/materialism and constructivism. By combining this pragmatic model with the history of the above-mentioned concepts, a sound basis for research on ICT-induced phenomena is generated.

Share

computergames

xirdalium Posted on by

computergames
 

It’s up; the website of my seminar ↑Computerspiele [computergames], which I will celebrate during the upcoming term is online. The seminar’s complete reading list consists of texts which are available online. Full bibliographical references and links are at the site. Here’s the seminar’s English abstract:
 

With contemporary sociocultural anthropology’s opening-up towards modernity, commodities, their consumption, appropriation, and meaning in diverse cultural milieus and contexts came into focus. Computergames are a true global commodity which not only diffuses via container-shipment, but via the Internet, too—and they are by no means manufactured and played in Europe and North-America only. The artefact computergame features a whole array of aspects which are worthwhile to be looked upon with a sociocultural anthropological gaze. For instance game- and gamercultures, social interaction (in each case on- and offline), the political and societal discourse on computergames, ideologically charged games, “non-western” games, the meaning and appropriation of computergames among diverse subgroups etc. The seminar will start with introductory topics, outlining the phenomenon computergame and its history. Afterwards above named aspects will be belaboured anthropologer-style.
Share

sin spirit

xirdalium Posted on by

Denny Colt aka The Spirit by Will Eisner
 

It was the first fair I went to alone. The side shows attracted me a lot, all the gambling booths not so much. Except one. It featured those moving stairs littered with coins. The player’s task was to insert coins which roll down a movable rail and then drop onto the moving stairs. The goal is to drop the coins in order to have the stairs triggering an avalanche of coins. The avalanche then falls into an abyss and resurface in a tray outside of the game-apparatus’ glass-cage. From this tray you then can pick up your gain, hoping that it amounts more than the sum of coins you already have invested.

The game itself didn’t interest me a bit, as I had observed the players, and from what I had seen it was quite obvious to me that there was hardly any chance to win. Of course the apparatus is designed in a way so that the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the house. But the booth I attended featured a particular knack. You didn’t throw regular currency into the glass cages, but you had to buy game-coins at first. Large silver dollar replicas in fact. At the end of the game you could hand in your silver dollars, that is, if you still had any, and the carnival-man gave you some prize from his shelves. The shelves were filled to the brim with all kinds of stuff. To each piece there was a small card attached, upon which stood, in neat handwriting, the amount of silver dollars necessary to claim that particular prize. Those cards hung at the usual knick-knack, there was nothing on display you really cared for, nothing you wanted to own. With one exception. A graphic novel.

For quite a time I already was fluent in the universes of superheroes, both Marvel and DC. Back then Batman was my favourite and men in tights with masks on their faces were my daily companions. But the cover of this graphic novel on the gambling booth’s shelf was different. It showed a man running towards the looker-on. The man wore a black mask around his eyes, but he wasn’t clad in colourful tights, there was no emblem, no superhero’s logo on his breast, no cape flapped behind him. He wore a business suit, complete with white shirt, tie, and … a hat! Of course we kids of the 1980’s knew men in suits. Bank clerks and the occasional teacher. We knew men sporting heads also. Old men. But in the 80’s no man in his prime would have worn a hat. Imagine, a hat! Like the guys in the film noir crime thriller flics. I just had to have this book and the amazing stories it for sure contained. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is very well as a motto, but in this case …

For some time I fed the glass-caged stairs with a wealth of those silvery currency substitutes. Until I realized that this would lead to nothing, except to loosing money, but surely not to winning that graphic novel. So I turned to the booth operator and asked him if I could buy that graphic novel, over there, upon his shelf. “Yes, of course,” he replied, handed me the book, and asked for a prize being a fraction of what I already had thrown onto his dreaded stairs. I did not even silently curse because of that, as I was perfectly happy with finally owning the book and headed straight home, to my grandma’s place.

The graphic novel was ↑“The Spirit“ by the late ↑Will Eisner (1917-2005), one of the true grandmasters of pen, brush & ink. Brian Doherty’s April 2005 ↑obituary from reason.com sums it up perfectly. We will listen to reason:
 

Will[iam Erwin] Eisner, who died in January, was a founder of the graphic novel—a medium in which serious, extended narratives appear in comic-book form. With his 1978 work A Contract With God [and Other Tenement Stories], he began a series of semi-autobiographical tales about big-city ethnics, earning acclaim both inside and outside the comics community.

But that was phase two of Eisner’s career. His first claim to fame lay in his weekly newspaper supplement, The Spirit (1940–1952). Those comics told tales of a masked crime fighter who battled grotesques and gangsters in a comic-noir New York called Central City. They dealt more with archetypes than with characters, and they often offered more violence than insight. But they were tense, funny, deeply urban, and deeply human; they have been reprinted repeatedly, continuing to capture readers even as the original pulp they were printed on flakes away to nothing.

As with the film noir of the ’40s that The Spirit resembles, unique craftsmanship—even in so “low” a field as comics or B movies—will not only attract new audiences; it will often be embraced, eventually, by cultural gatekeepers. On the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the image teasing Eisner’s obituary was not an anguished old man yearning to God but a lithe young Spirit punching out a crook.

No new medium is instantaneously accepted by a given cultural establishment, or even academia. Quite to the contrary. Platon considered the ability to write as dangerous for humankind. Painting and photography harvested comparable opinions. During the last century the emergence of cinema, comics, television, and computergames succeded each other. And each had to struggle against similar hostilities. Within every single of this arts or crafts the story again is quite the same. Take painting. When the airbrush arose there was strong opposition against this new tool. The main argument in its disfavour was: In contrast to the traditional brush, the airbrush doesn’t touch the canvas, the artist is haptically separated from its medium. And that does make the creation of art impossible? Now think of computer graphics—there isn’t even a canvas anymore.

Eisner indeed set milestones towards the acceptance of comics as art. Of course Eisner’s art at first was discussed within the comic community or scene, got journalistic, intellectual, and sometimes even academical response within the milieu’s own publications. On the fanzines’ pages Will Eisner’s graphic novels were especially praised for the succesful implementation of cinematic style, particularly film noir elements. ‘Camera angles’, lightsetting, particular graphic elements, and dramaturgy were mentioned in the discussions. The reviewers obviously were more than eager to demonstrate that this comics indeed were art, and devised a certain strategy to build their arguments: They used cinematography’s reputation, which by then already was accepted as an art, as a legitimation for graphic novels being an art, too. So Eisner’s succesful transponing of movie qualities to the medium comic was the big thing to praise.

I am tempted to say that with ↑“Sin City”—which I watched and re-watched last night— it’s the other way round; it has to be praised for succesfully transponing a graphic novel, it’s style, outstanding elements, and unique qualities to the big screen. “Sin City”, the adaptation of ↑Frank Miller‘s—Miller is the heir apparent to Eisner—graphic novel masterpiece, is the definite proof that graphic novels can be adapted to the medium of the moving image. The influences are a mutual thing.

A mutual thing at best, as I see the case slightly different.

The storyteller, the writer, the movie director, the game developer. The draftsman and the writer fuse and give birth to the comic book artist. Cinema influences comics. Comics influence cinema. All of them influence computergames. Computergames are adapted to movies. And so on. The possible timelines of development and influence are of historical interest and value, for sure, and they of course help to understand. But they are possible timelines, the actual connections can not be projected upon a straight line, can not be reduced to the development of the tools, to the history of technology. The connections form a more complex thing than an axis. Within “Sin City” everything fuses: storytelling, novel, painting, comics, movies, computer graphics. “Yeah, of course,” you’d say, “but in the end it is a movie which I can watch on the silver screen.” Yeah, and in the end “The Spirit” is a book you can read. That’s not the point. Artists are inspired by other artists, artists are inspired by artefacts of their own craft, but also by artefacts which lie way outside their own craft. In the end every artefact, or class of artefacts is unique, and has to be dealt with accordingly.

Central City—Basin City—↑Noir York City … got it?
 

Marv and Wendy leaving Basin City
 

The top pic shows Will Eisner himself on the right, and his creation Denny Colt aka The Spirit on the left. The pic at the end of the entry is a screencap from “Sin City”, showing Marv (Mickey Rourke) and Wendy (Jaime King) leaving [Ba]sin City in Wendy’s Jimmy-Dean Porsche—by the way, does anybody ever notice my careful choice of pics and screencaps?
Share

alan wake community infrastructure

xirdalium Posted on by

Alan wake Forums
 

Quite some things have changed concerning the structure of the online territory the Alan Wake community inhabits. AlanWAKE.net, home of the official Alan Wake forums, vanished in February, the URI was set to redirect to ↑http://www.alanwake.com/forum. The workload and effort to run a site of this size and complexity simply was too much for ADM, having an increasing study load at University sitting in his neck.
 

ADM:
I started up AlanWake.net in the start of May 2005, it was the first Alan Wake fansite on the net and it drew it quite a good amount of traffic as well. Around half a month later it became the official fansite and the forums became the official forums.
  &nbsp We had some good times and some great competitions here on the site, but unfortunately I must depart from my duties here.

It’s a similar story like with ↵MPHQ: In the end it depended on GutBomb’s work, time, and money—in one word: on one man’s dedication. Traffic and webspace is costly, and community sites of that magnitude need a lot of maintenance. Now Remedy has taken over the Alan Wake forums which now are hosted on Remedy’s very own server, which guarantees stability. Beyond community engagement corporate power is needed quite obviously. In the times of Max Payne the ↑3DRealms forums had this role of corporate-powered, reliable community forum. Quite early on in those days one of the most respected community members, Maddieman, became a Moderator there [he moderated at Frozmods and PayneReactor, too]. Now, after having sold the Max Payne franchise, Remedy can work on its own, and doesn’t need a publisher like 3DRealms/Rockstar for Alan Wake behind its back. Hence the hosting of the Alan Wake forums on a Remedy server—with Maddie as the administrator.
 

ADM:
Many may have noticed a new site admin on the forums, Maddieman. Many of you may know who he is if you’ve ever been in the Max Payne community.
  &nbsp He’s the guy responsible for the Katana mod(s) for Max Payne 1 and also the upcoming Matrix mod for MP1, The Real World. He’s an insanely good modder and I’m sure he’ll be just as good an admin as well […]
  &nbsp The forums are in good shape here, they’re on a very stable server so we won’t have any issues there and they are now in the hands of a very trustworthy man.

MikaRMD:
I am equally happy to have Maddieman accept our invitation to administrate the forums. I’m sure you all will get to know him. And his coolness almost matches with ADM. Plus he is an insane mod guru. Our history with Maddieman goes way back to the launch of Max Payne 1 when Maddie was, I guess, the first to come up with Max Payne mod tutorials for all to see. It was a time, that was not Remedy’s finest hour since the official tutorials took a really long time to get done. It is thanks to Maddie and others who did a great job helping others – without rewards or somebody telling them to do this.

On April fool’s day ↑AlanWAKE.net has reappeared, still run by ADM, but in a new shape: a wordpress-powered blog, of course complete with RSS-feed.

AlanWAKECentral.com now is called and located at ↑http://www.alanwake.co.uk/
and still possesses its forums ↑http://www.alanwakeforums.com/.
Earlier I observed that ↵AlanWAKECentral very much looked alike AlanWAKE.Net—at the new address it has kept this resemblance and may well have taken over the function the original AlanWAKE.Net had within the community.

In a nutshell, the backbone of the Alan Wake community’s online infrastructure now looks like this [in alphabetical order]:

↑AlanWAKE.co.uk—full-fledged UK community portal
↑Alan-Wake.de—German full-fledged community portal
↑AlanWAKEForums—the official forums
↑AlanWAKEGame.com—emerging fansite
↑AlanWAKE.net—ADM’s blog
↑WakeReactor—↑PayneReactor‘s twin
↑Alan Wake ZONE—German emerging community portal

I updated my sidebar’s siteroll accordingly.

Share

anthropology’s shades

xirdalium Posted on by

Me, wearing the anthropologer's shades 8)
Among the qualities which the issues anthropologists take up and belabour have, there is one which stings and delivers a lot of pain, again and again, during the whole process from shaping your project and defining the particular subject to writing the final text: No matter what topic you struggle with, sooner or later it appears to be integrally connected with a shipload of other issues and aspects. There is always the itch to scratch beneath the surfaces of this other aspects, to widely read around, to learn more new things. If you completely give way to this impulse you will end up with something the size of Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, or you will never find an end. It’s up to you, to decide if one of this two possibilities is better or worse. Personally I deem both of them to be impossibilities. The art of the craft lies not only in doing, but in restriction as well. Sensible, thoughtful restriction. There is a powerful, ultimate tool able to help you in finding the right measure of restriction. I am speaking of your topic, your hypothesis, the central question you want to answer by the argument you design. That is the benchmark, the yardstick in the light of which you have to scrutinize every step you make, every method you apply, every piece of literature you read, every path or trail you are seduced to follow.
    During the last days, or is it weeks already, I dwelled a lot within cyberpunk, a literary and movie genre, but a movement as well. Seen from a distance this may well seem to be a manifestation of escapism, backed-up by the half-hearted legitimation of it being a part of my research project. The legitimation is far from being half-hearted, and all but a subterfuge. The first half of the substantiation I gave within ↵lo tek nexus, I guess: The influence of cyberpunk fiction on the shaping of technology and cyberculture. Sometimes you are inclined to see certain works of cyberpunk as self-fulfilling prophecies. But it’s a mutual thing, and now I found the other half. Yet another rationale for my dealing with cyberpunk fitting the yardstick’s scale, for it indeed being an indispensable part of my endeavour.
    Inspired by SFAM’s collection of ↑elements defining a cyberpunk movie, and by Collins’ academical work (↵Collins 2002 and ↵2004) which not only tries to define, interprete, and analyze cyberpunk, but hooks it up with industrial music as well, I now re-read ↑Bruce Sterling‘s preface to the anthology ‘Mirrorshades’ (↵Sterling 1986) and his ↑‘Cyberpunk in the Nineties’ [if not stated otherwise, all quotes below are taken from the former]. While reading it struck me that cyberpunk and contemporary anthropology have much in common.
    Anthropology’s main focus once was on those non-european societies, which were envisioned as lacking scripture and ‘modern’ state-structure. This ‘field’ was dramatically expanded. Nowadays virtually every design of leading, managing and coping with life created by human beings is or can be subject of anthropological work. Anthropology has opened itself up to modernity and the reality of the global.
    Take Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s call to arms ‘Engaging Anthropology’ (↵Eriksen 2006):

From identity to multicultural society, new technologies to work, globalization to marginalization, anthropology has a vital contribution to make. While showcasing the intellectual power of discipline, Eriksen takes the anthropological community to task for its unwillingness to engage more proactively with the media in a wide range of current debates, from immigrant issues to biotechnology.

Anthropology has arrived in the present day, it deals with what happens now, within the world of which it is a part itself, and the ‘cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical “hard SF” extrapolation, technological literacy—are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.’ And the cyberpunks ‘aim for a wide-ranging, global point of view.’
    With anthropology taking up globalization as an issue, concepts like hybridization, creolization, and syncretism arose or re-arose. The concept of cultural appropriation prominently came into focus.
    ‘The cyberpunks,’ like anthropologists, ‘being hybrids themselves, are fascinated by interzones: the areas where, in the words of William Gibson, “the street finds its own uses for things.”‘
    ‘The Eighties,’ when cyberpunk was born, were ‘an era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication, a broader perspective.’:

Traditionally there has been a yawning cultural gulf between the sciences and the humanities: a gulf between literary culture, the formal world of art and politics and the culture of science, the world of engineering and industry. But the gap is crumbling in unexpected fashion. Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change. […] And now that technology has reached a fever pitch, its influence has slipped control and reached street level. […] the technical revolution reshaping our society is based not in hierarchy but in decentralization, not in rigidity but in fluidity. […] Science fiction—at least according to its official dogma—has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since […] when Science was safely enshrined—and confined—in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.

‘The tools of global integration—the satellite media net, the multinational corporation—fascinate the cyberpunks and figure constantly in their work. Cyberpunk has little patience with borders.’ Studying-up, organizational and corporate anthropology, multisited-ethnography, diaspora and transnational communities, media and urban anthropology anybody … ?
    ‘[Cyberpunk writers] often use an unblinking, almost clinical objectivity. It is a coldly objective analysis, a technique borrowed from science, then put to literary use for classically punk shock value.’ Here I have to disagree slightly, as I do not see that cyberpunk fiction analyzes coldly, clinical, and objective, but emotional, evocative, and humane. Just like post-writing-culture experimental ethnography strives to. Cyberpunk has more in common with the humanities and state-of-the-art anthropology than with science.
    ‘In pop culture, practice comes first; theory follows limping in its tracks’—in modern anthropology, practice comes first; grounded theory follows limping in its tracks.
    ‘Cyberpunk is widely known for its telling use of detail, its carefully constructed intricacy, its willingness to carry extrapolation into the fabric of daily life.’ Ethnographical detail, and beyond, up to ‘thick description’—or what has become of it—still is important within anthropology, anthropology definitely is occupied with the fabric of daily life and with Geertz’ web of meaning, being an extrapolation par excellence when written down. Cyberpunk ‘writers prize the bizarre, the surreal, the formerly unthinkable.’
    In the end anthropology is about making sense of the ways to think, and in consequence to act, of ‘the Others.’ At first the described cultural practices and realities more often than not appear to the reader exotic, bizarre, surreal, sometimes even unthinkable. Would that not be the case, there would be no need for anthropology.
    Since about the beginning of 1982, mirrored sunglasses have been a common symbol, a ‘totem’ to cyberpunk, to ‘”the Movement”—a loose generational nexus of ambitious young writers, who swapped letters, manuscripts, ideas, glowing praise, and blistering criticism.’. Chromium plated mirrorshades pretend to be perfect silver, so perfect nothing that their only remaining ability is reflecting everything, distortions added. But producing purely descriptive ethnography is not only an illusion, but far from being part of anthropology’s state-of-the-art—alas, reflection is. So I was somewhat relieved when I learned from Mr. Sterling that the cyberpunks’ shades could have been of a matte black, too. Matte black mirrorshades are a way better metaphor. They still reflect, but they are not solely smoke’n’mirrors [Yes, it’s me on the pic above. Cute, ain’t I?], and matte black shades are more honest, as from a certain angle, in certain settings of light, you still can see the eyes. They do not hide the anthropologist completely, but they are there, the shades themselves can be seen and signal to the one who sees: that one is seeing differently.
    Sometimes we anthropologists of my age are so preoccupied with attaining tenure, because we have to make a living, because there of course are the power structures, that we bow down to the pressures. Pressures stemming from ill-advised bureaucracies, policy makers, and backward academical establishments, ‘normal’ academia. One day it may well turn out that what I am doing right now is utter rubbish, and it may well be that I agree then, but till then I want to do anthropology as I see, or even envision it through my shades. Like Wikipedia encourages hesitating contributors: Be bold, be brave. “By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws.” One reviewer said, that ↑William Gibson “has tapped right into our collective cultural mainline”—a current anthropologist’s dream, isn’ it?
    When university is full, the anthropologists will walk the streets.

Share