Category Archives: Post Human

In Sense8, the Wachowskis find another way out of the Matrix: empathy. Credit Photograph by Murray Close / Netflix / Everett

The defining scene of Sense8, the new sci-fi drama on Netflix, comes about halfway through the first season. It starts in San Francisco, where Nomi, a hacktivist and transgender lesbian, is making out with her girlfriend, Amanita. At the same time, in Mexico City, Lito, a smoldering actor, is lifting weights with his boyfriend, Hernando. In Berlin, Wolfgang, a safecracker, is relaxing, naked, in a hot tub. And in Chicago, Will, a police officer, is working out at the gym. The premise of Sense8 is that Nomi, Lito, Wolfgang, and Willalong with four other sensates in Nairobi, Seoul, Mumbai, and Reykjavikare telepathically linked. They are able to feel each others emotions, appear in each others minds, and even control each others bodies. In this instance, because theyre all feeling sexy, the sensates find themselves having an impromptutelepathic orgy. Theyre a little freaked out until they realize that they can all enjoy Wolfgangs hot tubsimultaneously.

All sorts of crazy things happen in Sense8. Theres a big conspiracy that may explain how the sensates came to be linked. Theres sci-fi theorizing about human evolution and psychic phenomena. There are euphoric action sequences in which Sun Bak, the Korean sensate, deploys heracrobatic martial-arts skills. (Two of the shows three executive producers, Andy and Lana Wachowski, were responsible for The Matrix.) When a car chase ensues, the sensates can take turns driving the same car. One episode includes aBollywood dance number. Other scenes, in which the sensatescombine their skills and consciousnessesto solve insurmountable problems, have a ludic, dance-like energy: in one of the shows best moments, all eight main characters find themselvessinging Whats Up, by 4 Non Blondes. In another scene, they allflash back to their own birthswhile listening to Beethovens Emperor Piano Concerto No. 5. (The Wachowskis havesaidthat they filmed live births for the show, and, watching the scene, you believe it.)

In sci-fi speak, Sense8 is about transhumanismthe idea that in the future, as a species, we might become more than we are right now. Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous, coined the term in a 1927 book called Religion Without Revelation, in which he wrote that transhumanism was man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. Huxley helped found the World Wildlife Fund and was the first director of UNESCO; he was also, for a time, the president of the British Eugenics Society. Like him,the transhumanist movementwhich now tends to focus on high-tech enhancementis both intriguing and scary.

Sense8, though, isnt really about the negative aspects of transhumanism. It makes emotionally expansive telepathic empathy seem like a great ideaits global, sexy, useful, and romantic. The sensates become friends and even fall in love with one another. (Will, the Chicago cop, gets together with Riley, an Icelandic d.j.) In one scene, set at the Diego Rivera Museum, in Mexico City, Nomi, the transgender hacker, helps Lito, who is closeted, come out. Sense8 is not subtlethis is sci-fi T.V.but their scene together issimple, direct, and moving: theres a lot of authentic emotion to go with all the artifice. (Slate has called Sense8 a queer masterpiece; Jamie Clayton, the actress who plays Nomi, is transgender, as is Lana Wachowski.) Some people dont like the sensatesan evil biotech corporation has it out for them, and some reviewers have found Sense8 to be cheesy, nonsensical, and slow. Fair enough, but if youre in the shows target audienceif you rooted for Neo and Trinitys romance in The Matrixyoull enjoy it. Despite its sci-fi premise, Sense8 is almost entirely about strong feelings. Its transhumanism for softies.

Sci-fi stories divide roughly into three categories. First, there are stories about regular people who just happen to live in the future, like Star Trek and Star Wars. Second, there are transhumanist stories, such asDuneandSense8, in which human nature is somehow altered. And third, there are robot stories, in which human nature is, for the most part, fixed, the better to be inherited by our technological replacementsthe Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, say, or Ava, the robot in Alex Garlands recent film, Ex Machina. Many great works of science fiction weave these mini-genres together. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL inherits our flawed human nature and goes mad. At the same time, the film is a transhumanist tale, in which the ships surviving astronaut ascends to a new plane of consciousness. Transhumanist stories and robot stories are mirror images of each other. Robot stories ask whether our spiritual flaws will trickle down to the new beings we create; transhumanist stories ask whether they will propagate up into the beings we become.

Recently, in awonderful essayin theNew York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about the ancient roots of the robot story. He pointed out that there are robots in theIliad, and that robot tales address theological questions about creators and their creations. Today, though, stories about robotsparticularly human-shaped oneshave come to feel a little quaint. Technology has made the classic robot obsolete. In Humans, a new show on AMC, robots that look and act like human beings are shown tending tomato plants on a farm. Its a striking image, but we all know that, in real-life, agricultural robots arelikely to be weird-looking. In Ex Machina, Ava, the robot played by Alicia Vikander, is a compelling femme fatale; even so, you cant help noticing that, unlike every other piece of technology in the modern world, she isnt networked, and can communicate with other robots only by speaking. Samantha, the artificial intelligence voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Her, seems more in sync with technological reality: shes a cloud-based software program capable of realizing herself at many physical locations simultaneously, the same way Google appears on many screens at once. (Genisys, the evil A.I. in the new Terminator movie, operates on a similar principle.) This doesnt make Her better than Ex Machina, but it does mean that, while Her seems to present a plausible vision of the future, Ex Machina feels more like a fable.

For a while now, robot stories have been shifting to the cloud. In the CBS showPerson of Interest,two cloud-based A.I.s are locked in a power struggle, manipulating stock exchanges, operating shell corporations, and giving orders to acolytes who regard them with quasi-religious reverence. In Ann Leckies novel Ancillary Justice, a single intelligence, housed in a spaceshipa giant robot, in a sensemakes its presence felt through people, called ancillaries, whose bodies it controls remotely; in effect, its turnedusinto robots. This is a big reversal. Traditional robot stories tend to be Promethean: theyre about people who seize the forbidden and god-like power of creation. By contrast, artificial-intelligence stories are about people who invent their own god-like overlords. They know that the new gods are just complicated programs, but they end up subjugated by them anyway.

Theres always been some crossover between robot and transhumanist stories, because people, if they are transformed enough, can become posthuman. That process, too, has changed over time. In the 1965 novel Dune, the hero used a psychedelic drug to upgrade his consciousness; by contrast, in last years Transcendence, Johnny Depp uploaded himself into a quantum computer. But most transhumanist stories stop far short of total transformation, instead exploring the discrete consequences of highly specific transhuman upgrades. In Starfish, Peter Watts imagines a power station, located at a deep-sea vent, where physical modifications (replaced lungs, enhanced eyes) allow the workers to swim among the tube worms; some divers go native, developing a new sensibility suited for the sea floor. Liking What You See: A Documentary, a short story by Ted Chiang, takes place at a hyper-progressive liberal-arts college where the students have modified their brains so that they cant distinguish between beautiful people and ugly people. (For decades peopleve been willing to talk about racism and sexism, but theyre still reluctant to talk about lookism, one student complains.) Some professors think this is a great idea, because the hierarchy of personal beauty is offensive; others wonder how the new, beauty-blind student body is supposed to produce any great painters or sculptors. Theres a gleeful, brutal curiosity to these stories. They envision a future when our economic and cultural niches shrink and we change ourselves to fit within them. Today, we have subcultures; in the future, well have subspecies.

Many transhumanist stories have a circular structure: theyre about the rediscovery (or nostalgic appreciation) of old human virtues. The most optimistic transhumanist novel that Ive read recently is Ramez Naams Nexus. Naam is a programmer by trade; in a previous life, he helped develop Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. In his book, billions of people take a drugactually a soup of nano-machinesthat allows them to network their brains together, so that they can experience each others thoughts, sensations, and memories. Then, usingmeditation techniquesthat theyve learned from Buddhist monks in Thailand, they synchronize their minds, merging into a single, vast consciousness. In this form, the transhumans must confront the menace posed by a posthuman: an intelligent Chinese computer system, based upon the mind of a gifted scientist, that controls weapons and other gadgets all over the world. On one level, Nexus is a libertarian techno-fable about how bottom-up innovation will win out over top-down systems of control. But its also wistfully old-fashioneda paean to Buddhist meditators, who, when you think about it, probably came up with this whole transhumanism thing in the first place.

If you read a lot of science fiction in one go, you notice that it has two weaknesses. The first is the future, which tends to be complicated, depressing, and fatiguing to read about; the second is the aesthetic of futurism, which is grim and predictable. Everything is big, scary, and metallic (or else small, gross, and biotechnological). The implicit message of futurism is thathuman progress is inseparable from suffering; often, the only kind of beauty is terrible beauty. Futurism is what gives sci-fi itsfrisson. The supposedly horrific vision of the future in The Matrix, for example,is also undeniably cool; the robots may have won, but the survivors look great in their leather and shades. This paradox makes the movie great, but its also a kind of trapan aesthetic cynicism.

Sense8, though, is joyful, in part because it shows us transhumanism without futurism. Its not a superhero show, in which a random individual is elevated into something better; it hints, science-fictionally, at a fundamental change in human nature generally. At the same time, theres no technological explanationand, therefore, no futurist costfor that change.(In one episode, its suggested that, in the distant evolutionary past,allhuman beings were once telepathic, but no one seems to care very much about this hand-wavey idea.) On some level, the sensates telepathic empathy is a metaphor for the Internet, which seems, in some ways, to be making us more open to others experiences (especially queer experiences). The show also evokes the joys of creative collaboration: people who watch the Wakowskis work together often say that they have two bodies, one brain. Really, though, the point of Sense8 is to revel in the broadening of empathyto fantasize about how in-tune with each other we could be. In its own, low-key way, therefore, Sense8 is a critique of sci-fi. It asks whether, in tying our dreams about human transformation to fantasies of technological development, we might be making an error. The show suggests another path to transcendence: each other.

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Sympathetic Sci-Fi - The New Yorker

A tiny portion of humanity turned its back on mankind in the waning days of the last Golden Age. Over one and a half centuries later, the PHR has emerged from the shadows as an unrecognisable civilisation, its people irrevocably changed. They are no longer simple human beings, they are post-humans - cyborgs.

A society no more than three billion strong, the PHR is a nation of elites, each individual more than a match for several lesser mortals. With remarkable speed, they have made technological advancements surpassing those of the UCM. Since its fiery birth, the PHR has been guided by the enigmatic White Sphere, a mysterious object of immense power. It is treated by the people of the PHR with a reverence bordering on worship.

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Digital Design Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016) is available on Amazon.

Futurist experts have estimated that by the year 2030 computers in the price range of inexpensive laptops will have a computational power that is equivalent to human intelligence. The implications of this change will be dramatic and revolutionary, presenting significant opportunities and challenges to designers. Already machines can process spoken language, recognize human faces, detect our emotions, and target us with highly personalized media content. While technology has tremendous potential to empower humans, soon it will also be used to make them thoroughly obsolete in the workplace, whether by replacing, displacing, or surveilling them. More than ever designers need to look beyond human intelligence and consider the effects of their practice on the world and on what it means to be human.

The question of how to design a secure human future is complicated by the uncertainties of predicting that future. As it is practiced today, design is strategically positioned to improve the usefulness and quality of human interactions with technology. Like all human endeavors, however, the practice of design risks marginalization if it is unable to evolve. When envisioning the future of design, our social and psychological frames of reference unavoidably and unconsciously bias our interpretation of the world. People systematically underestimate exponential trends such as Moores law, for example, which tells us that in 10 years we will have 32 times more total computing power than today. Indeed, as computer scientist Ray Kurzweil observes, "We wont experience 100 years of technological advances in the 21st century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress (again when measured by todays rate of progress), or about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century."

Design-oriented research provides a possible means to anticipate and guide rapid changes, as design, predicated as it is on envisioning alternatives through "collective imagining," is inherently more future-oriented than other fields. It therefore seems reasonable to ask how technology-design efforts might focus more effectively on enabling human-oriented systems that extend beyond design for humanity. In other words, is it possible to design intelligent systems that safely design themselves?

Imagine a future scenario in which extremely powerful computerized minds are simulated and shared across autonomous virtual or robotic bodies. Given the malleable nature of such super-intelligencesthey wont be limited by the hardwiring of DNA informationone can reasonably assume that they will be free of the limitations of a single material body, or the experience of a single lifetime, allowing them to tinker with their own genetic code, integrate survival knowledge directly from the learnings of others, and develop a radical new form of digital evolution that modifies itself through nearly instantaneous exponential cycles of imitation and learning, and passes on its adaptations to successive generations of "self." We must transcend the limitations of human-centered design.

In such a post-human future, the simulation of alternative histories and futures could be used as a strategic evolutionary tool, allowing imaginary scenarios to be inhabited and played out before individuals or populations commit to actual change. Not only would the lineage of such beings be perpetually enhanced by automation, leading to radical new forms of social relationships and values, but the systems that realize or govern those values would likely become the instinctual mechanism of a synchronized and sentient "techno-cultural mind."

Bringing such speculative and hypothetical scenarios into cultural awareness is one way that designers can evaluate possibilities and determine how best to proceed. What should designers do to prepare for such futures? What methods should be applied to their research and training?

Todays interaction designers shape human behavior through investigative research, systemic thinking, creative prototyping, and rapid iteration. Can these same methods be used to address the multitude of longer-term social and ethical issues that designers create? Do previous inventions, such as the internal combustion engine or nuclear power, provide relevant historical lessons to learn from? If little else, reflecting on super-intelligence through the lens of nuclear proliferation and global warming throws light on the existential consequences of poor design. It becomes clear that while systemic thinking and holistic research are useful methods for addressing existential risks, creative prototyping or rapid iteration with nuclear power or the environment as materials is probably unwise. Existential risks do not allow for a second chance to get it right. The only possible course of action when confronted with such challenges is to examine all possible future scenarios and use the best available subjective estimates of objective risk factors.

Simulations can also be leveraged to heighten designers awareness of trade-offs. Consider the consequences of contemporary interaction design, for example: intuitive interfaces, systemic experiences, and service economies. When current design methods are applied to designing future systems, each of these patterns can be extended through imagined simulations of posthuman design. Intuitive human-computer interfaces become interfaces between post- humans; they become new ways of mediating interdependent personal and cultural valuesnew social and political systems. Systemic experiences become new kinds of emergent post-human perception and awareness. Service economies become the synapses of tomorrows underlying system of techno-cultural values, new moral codes.

The first major triumph of interaction design, the design of the intuitive interface, merged technology with aesthetics. Designers adapted modernisms static typography and industrial styling and learned to address human factors and usability concerns. Today agile software practices and design thinking ensure the intuitive mediation of human and machine learning. We adapt to the design limitations of technological systems, and they adapt in return based on how we behave. This interplay is embodied by the design of the interface itself, between perception and action, affordance and feedback. As the adaptive intelligence of computer systems grows over time, design practices that emphasize the human aspects of interface design will extend beyond the one-sided human perspective of machine usability toward a reciprocal relationship that values intelligent systems as partners. In light of the rapid evolution of these new forms of artificial and synergetic life, the quality and safety of their mental and physical experiences may ultimately deserve equal if not greater consideration than ours. Post-human-centered design will teach intelligent machine systems to design the hierarchies of human behavior.

Interaction design can also define interconnected networks of interface touch-points and shape them into choose-your-own-adventures of human experience. We live in a world of increasingly seamless integration between Wi-Fi networks and thin clients, between phones, homes, watches, and cars. In the near future, crowdsourcing systems coupled with increasingly pervasive connectivity services and wearable computer interfaces will generate massive stockpiles of data that catalog human behavior to feed increasingly intuitive learning machines. Just as human-centered design crafts structure and experience to shape intuition, post-human-centered design will teach intelligent machine systems to design the hierarchies and compositions of human behavior. New systems will flourish as fluent extensions of our digital selves, facilitating seamless mobility throughout systems of virtual identity and the governance of shared thoughts and emotions.

Applying interaction design to post-human experience requires designers to think holistically beyond the interface to the protocols and exchanges that unify human and machine minds. Truly systemic post-human-centered designers recognize that such interfaces will ultimately manifest in the psychological fabric of post-human society at much deeper levels of meaning and value. Just as todays physical products have slid from ownership to on-demand digital services, our very conception of these services will become the new product. In the short term, advances in wearable and ubiquitous computing technology will render our inner dimensions of motivation and self-perception tangible as explicit and actionable cues. Ultimately such manifestations will be totally absorbed by the invisible hand of post-human cognition and emerge as new forms of social and self-engineering. Design interventions at this level will deeply control the post-human psyche, building on research methodologies of experience economics designed for the strategic realization of social and cognitive value. Can a market demand be designed for goodwill toward humans at this stage, or does the long tail of identity realization preclude it? Will we live in a utopian world of socialized techno-egalitarian fulfillment and love or become a eugenic cult of celebrity self-actualization?

It seems unlikely that humans will stem their fascination with technology or stop applying it to improve themselves and their immediate material condition. Tomorrows generation faces an explosion of wireless networks, ubiquitous computing, context-aware systems, intelligent machines, smart cars, robots, and strategic modifications to the human genome. While the precise form these changes will take is unclear, recent history suggests that they are likely to be welcomed at first and progressively advanced. It appears reasonable that human intelligence will become obsolete, economic wealth will reside primarily in the hands of super-intelligent machines, and our ability to survive will lie beyond our direct control. Adapting to cope with these changes, without alienating the new forms of intelligence that emerge, requires transcending the limitations of human-centered design. Instead, a new breed of post-human-centered designer is needed to maximize the potential of post-evolutionary life.

This essay was adapted with permission from Digital Design Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016) edited by Helen Armstrong.

Photo: Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

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A Post-Human World Is Coming. Design Has Never Mattered ...

This article is about a critique of humanism. For the futurist ideology and movement, see transhumanism.

Posthumanism or post-humanism (meaning "after humanism" or "beyond humanism") is a term with at least seven definitions according to philosopher Francesca Ferrando:[1]

Philosopher Ted Schatzki suggests there are two varieties of posthumanism of the philosophical kind:[12]

One, which he calls 'objectivism', tries to counter the overemphasis of the subjective or intersubjective that pervades humanism, and emphasises the role of the nonhuman agents, whether they be animals and plants, or computers or other things.[12]

A second prioritizes practices, especially social practices, over individuals (or individual subjects) which, they say, constitute the individual.[12]

There may be a third kind of posthumanism, propounded by the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. Though he did not label it as 'posthumanism', he made an extensive and penetrating immanent critique of Humanism, and then constructed a philosophy that presupposed neither Humanist, nor Scholastic, nor Greek thought but started with a different religious ground motive.[13] Dooyeweerd prioritized law and meaningfulness as that which enables humanity and all else to exist, behave, live, occur, etc. "Meaning is the being of all that has been created," Dooyeweerd wrote, "and the nature even of our selfhood."[14] Both human and nonhuman alike function subject to a common 'law-side', which is diverse, composed of a number of distinct law-spheres or aspects.[15] The temporal being of both human and non-human is multi-aspectual; for example, both plants and humans are bodies, functioning in the biotic aspect, and both computers and humans function in the formative and lingual aspect, but humans function in the aesthetic, juridical, ethical and faith aspects too. The Dooyeweerdian version is able to incorporate and integrate both the objectivist version and the practices version, because it allows nonhuman agents their own subject-functioning in various aspects and places emphasis on aspectual functioning.[16]

Ihab Hassan, theorist in the academic study of literature, once stated:

Humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something one must helplessly call posthumanism.[17]

This view predates most currents of posthumanism which have developed over the late 20th century in somewhat diverse, but complementary, domains of thought and practice. For example, Hassan is a known scholar whose theoretical writings expressly address postmodernity in society.[citation needed] Beyond postmodernist studies, posthumanism has been developed and deployed by various cultural theorists, often in reaction to problematic inherent assumptions within humanistic and enlightenment thought.[4]

Theorists who both complement and contrast Hassan include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, cyberneticists such as Gregory Bateson, Warren McCullouch, Norbert Wiener, Bruno Latour, Cary Wolfe, Elaine Graham, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway Peter Sloterdijk, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Douglas Kellner. Among the theorists are philosophers, such as Robert Pepperell, who have written about a "posthuman condition", which is often substituted for the term "posthumanism".[5][6]

Posthumanism differs from classical humanism by relegating humanity back to one of many natural species, thereby rejecting any claims founded on anthropocentric dominance.[18] According to this claim, humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or set themselves above it in ethical considerations a priori. Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. The limitations and fallibility of human intelligence are confessed, even though it does not imply abandoning the rational tradition of humanism.[citation needed]

Proponents of a posthuman discourse, suggest that innovative advancements and emerging technologies have transcended the traditional model of the human, as proposed by Descartes among others associated with philosophy of the Enlightenment period.[19] In contrast to humanism, the discourse of posthumanism seeks to redefine the boundaries surrounding modern philosophical understanding of the human. Posthumanism represents an evolution of thought beyond that of the contemporary social boundaries and is predicated on the seeking of truth within a postmodern context context. In so doing, it rejects previous attempts to establish 'anthropological universals' that are imbued with anthropocentric assumptions.[18]

The philosopher Michel Foucault placed posthumanism within a context that differentiated humanism from enlightenment thought. According to Foucault, the two existed in a state of tension: as humanism sought to establish norms while Enlightenment thought attempted to transcend all that is material, including the boundaries that are constructed by humanistic thought.[18] Drawing on the Enlightenments challenges to the boundaries of humanism, posthumanism rejects the various assumptions of human dogmas (anthropological, political, scientific) and take the next step by attempting to change the nature of thought about what it means to be human. This requires not only decentering the human in multiple discourses (evolutionary, ecological, technological) but also examining those discourses to uncover inherent humanistic, anthropocentric, normative notions of humanness and the concept of the human.[4]

Posthumanistic discourse aims to open up spaces to examine what it means to be human and critically question the concept of "the human" in light of current cultural and historical contexts[4] In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles, writes about the struggle between different versions of the posthuman as it continually co-evolves alongside intelligent machines.[20] Such coevolution, according to some strands of the posthuman discourse, allows one to extend their subjective understandings of real experiences beyond the boundaries of embodied existence. According to Hayles's view of posthuman, often referred to as technological posthumanism, visual perception and digital representations thus paradoxically become ever more salient. Even as one seeks to extend knowledge by deconstructing perceived boundaries, it is these same boundaries that make knowledge acquisition possible. The use of technology in a contemporary society is thought to complicate this relationship.

Hayles discusses the translation of human bodies into information (as suggested by Hans Moravec) in order illuminate how the boundaries of our embodied reality have been compromised in the current age and how narrow definitions of humanness no longer apply. Because of this, according to Hayles, posthumanism is characterized by a loss of subjectivity based on bodily boundaries.[4] This strand of posthumanism, including the changing notion of subjectivity and the disruption of ideas concerning what it means to be human, is often associated with Donna Haraways concept of the cyborg.[4] However, Haraway has distanced herself from posthumanistic discourse due to other theorists use of the term to promote utopian views of technological innovation to extend the human biological capacity[21] (even though these notions would more correctly fall into the realm of transhumanism[4]).

While posthumanism is a broad and complex ideology, it has relevant implications today and for the future. It attempts to redefine social structures without inherently humanly or even biological origins, but rather in terms of social and psychological systems where consciousness and communication could potentially exist as unique disembodied entities. Questions subsequently emerge with respect to the current use and the future of technology in shaping human existence,[18] as do new concerns with regards to language, symbolism, subjectivity, phenomenology, ethics, justice and creativity.[22]

Posthumanism is sometimes used as a synonym for an ideology of technology known as "transhumanism" because it affirms the possibility and desirability of achieving a "posthuman future", albeit in purely evolutionary terms.

James Hughes comments that there is considerable confusion between the two terms.[23][24]

Some critics have argued that all forms of posthumanism have more in common than their respective proponents realize.[25]

However, posthumanists in the humanities and the arts are critical of transhumanism, in part, because they argue that it incorporates and extends many of the values of Enlightenment humanism and classical liberalism, namely scientism, according to performance philosopher Shannon Bell:[26]

Altruism, mutualism, humanism are the soft and slimy virtues that underpin liberal capitalism. Humanism has always been integrated into discourses of exploitation: colonialism, imperialism, neoimperialism, democracy, and of course, American democratization. One of the serious flaws in transhumanism is the importation of liberal-human values to the biotechno enhancement of the human. Posthumanism has a much stronger critical edge attempting to develop through enactment new understandings of the self and others, essence, consciousness, intelligence, reason, agency, intimacy, life, embodiment, identity and the body.[26]

While many modern leaders of thought are accepting of nature of ideologies described by posthumanism, some are more skeptical of the term. Donna Haraway, the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, has outspokenly rejected the term, though acknowledges a philosophical alignment with posthumanim. Haraway opts instead for the term of companion species, referring to nonhuman entities with which humans coexist.[21]

Questions of race, some argue, are suspiciously elided within the "turn" to posthumanism. Noting that the terms "post" and "human" are already loaded with racial meaning, critical theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that the impulse to move "beyond" the human within posthumanism too often ignores praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, including Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire to Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten. Interrogating the conceptual grounds in which such a mode of beyond is rendered legible and viable, Jackson argues that it is important to observe that blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or disruption" which posthumanists invite. In other words, given that race in general and blackness in particular constitutes the very terms through which human/nonhuman distinctions are made, for example in enduring legacies of scientific racism, a gesture toward a beyond actually returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged.

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Posthumanism - Wikipedia

Welcome to the Second Edition of our Glocal Symposium Series on the topic of the Posthuman.This event has been generously supported byNYU -Liberal Studies, Office ofStudent Affairs.

It features more than 30 international speakers and performers.Our keynote this year is: Dr. Natasha Vita-More.

The specific focus of this Symposium is dedicated to the significance of the posthuman in relation to near and far futures. We will address current global issues in terms of possible posthuman futures, in ordertospark a deep and multilayered analysisofwhat the notion of posthuman futures implies.In the contemporary era, characterized by different political, economical, cultural, religious, social and environmental conflicts, the traditional approach based on the humanistic attempt to acknowledge our shared humanity has not been successful. What can posthumanism add to the conversation? Howcana post-humanistic,post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic approach be achieved in conflicts resolution, without repeating the failed resolution attempts of the past?More specifically,these are some of the global issues we would like to address: human and non human migration; racism, sexism, ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism; religious fundamentalism and Islamophobia; technological unemployment and economic disparities; environmental issues; non human animals and robot personhood. What perspective can posthumanism offer to these global issues?

Focusing on key notionssuch as transformation and hybridization, but also heritage conservation and cultural acknowledgment, we will delve into our posthuman futures. A reflection on space ethics (including space travel; space exploration; space commercialization), bio-technology and bio-conservation, human and non-human enhancement;emerging technology and economic equity,post-genders and post-humanities will merge with our rigorous analysis of posthuman futures. We welcome proposals on posthuman developments and religion, including the spiritual dimension of virtual reality and virtual communities, the religious-mythological nature of hyperreality, the enhancement of meditative techniques through technology, the religious life of humanoid robots and robotic communities, the theological response of religious communities to posthumanism, the effect of cyborgian immortality on religious doctrine, and the reconceptualization of transgressive behaviours.

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Posthuman Futures | KurzweilAI

The 9th Beyond Humanism Conferencewill take place at John Cabot University in Rome from the 20th of July until the 22nd of July 2017.

Posthuman Studies Humanities, Metahumanities, Posthumanitieswww.beyondhumansim.org

Keynote Speaker: Sven Helbig(http://www.svenhelbig.com/)

CFP(Call for Papers)

Posthuman Studies Humanities, Metahumanities, Posthumanities

Papers can be presented which analyse what it is to be human in an age of rapid technological, scientific, cultural and social evolution. As the boundaries between human and the other, technological, biological and environmental, are eroded and perceptions of normalcy are challenged, they have generated a range of ethical, philosophical, cultural, and artistic questions. Drawing on theory from critical posthumanism and the normative reflections of transhumanism the conference will encourage constructive but rigorously critical dialogue.

Conference papers can be on issues such as the consequences of enhancement, especially bioenhancement, transhumanist, and posthumanist accounts of the human, and any and all ways in which they impact culture and society. The conference organizers encourage submissions from a range of disciplines such as: philosophy, sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, critical theory, media studies, bioethics, medical ethics, anthropology, religious studies, disability studies, gender studies, queer studies, critical animal studies, environmental studies, and the visual arts.

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A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike, strap-on phallus. Clandestine experiments of sensory depravation and mental torture unleash psychic powers in test subjects, prompting them to explode into showers of black pus or tear the flesh off each other's bodies in a sexual frenzy. Meanwhile, a hysterical cyborg sex-slave runs amok through busy streets whilst electrically charged demi-gods battle for supremacy on the rooftops above. This is cyberpunk, Japanese style: a brief filmmaking movement that erupted from the Japanese underground to garner international attention in the late 1980s.

The world of live-action Japanese cyberpunk is a twisted and strange one indeed; a far cry from the established notions of computer hackers, ubiquitous technologies and domineering conglomerates as found in the pages of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) - a pivotal cyberpunk text during the sub-genre's formation and recognition in the early eighties. From a cinematic standpoint, it perhaps owes more to the industrial gothic of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976) and the psycho-sexual body horror of early David Cronenberg than the rain-soaked metropolis of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), although Scott's neon infused tech-noir has been a major aesthetic touchstone for cyberpunk manga and anime institutions such as Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1982-90) and Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell (1989- ).

In the Western world, cyberpunk was born out of the new wave science fiction literature of the sixties and seventies; authors such Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick - whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was the basis for Blade Runner - were key proponents in its inception, creating worlds that featured artificial life, social decay and technological dependency. The hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett also proved influential with regards to the sub-genre's overall pessimistic stance. What came to be known as cyberpunk by the mid 1980s was thematically characterised by its exploration of the impact of high-technology on low-lives - people living in squalor; stacked on top of one another within an oppressive metropolis dominated by advanced technologies.

Live-action, Japanese cyberpunk on the other hand, is raw and primal by nature, and characterised by attitude rather than high-concept. A collision between flesh and metal, the sub-genre is an explosion of sex, violence, concrete and machinery; a small collection of pocket-sized universes that revel in post-human nightmares and teratological fetishes, powered by a boundaryless sense of invasiveness and violation. Imagery is abject, perverse and unpredictable and, like Cronenberg's work, bodily mutation through technological intervention is a major theme, as are dehumanisation, repression and sexuality. During the late eighties and early nineties, it was a sub-strain characterised largely by the early work of two directors; Shinya Tsukamoto and Shozin Fukui.

These directors made films that were short, sharp, bludgeoning and centred on corporeal horrors that saw the body invaded, infected and infused with technology. Tsukamoto's contributions are perhaps the most famous; Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) and Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer (1992). Both films present the nightmarish situation of their protagonists (played by actor Tomorowo Taguchi in both) undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis that sees a humble salaryman turn from a human into a hybrid of flesh and scrap metal.

Although not as well known to western audiences, Fukui's work is also important. Stylistically similar to Tsukamoto but sufficiently divergent so as not to be a mere copy, Fukui opened up the sub-genre's pallet by incorporating Cronenberg like scientific experiments that impact on the body through technological augmentation as evidenced in his contributions Pinocchio v946 (1991) and Rubber's Lover (1996). These films focus on the venerability of the human mind and how such alteration can cause more than a physical change in appearance, but create a completely new mental state and thought processes that are beyond human.

Tsukamoto and Fukui eschewed many of conventions crystallised by Gibson's archetypal Neuromancer. There are no mega-conglomerates or incidences of virtual reality and the power struggle between high-technology versus low-quality of life is replaced by low-technology versus low-life. The technology in their vision of cyberpunk consisted of industrial scrap - Tetsuo - and makeshift laboratories built from crude and dated equipment - Rubber's Lover - lending a DIY aesthetic to their overall ethos. These were, after all, films made with little or no money and as a result, were not set in gargantuan, near-future metropolises but the present-day, real-life cyberpunk city of Tokyo, suggesting that anxieties over rapid modernity are not some far-off venture but something that should be worried about now. Both filmmakers also had a fixation with post-industrial landscapes; using scrap yards, boiler rooms, abandoned warehouses, compounds and factories as decaying playgrounds for their ideas.

However, this new and defiant take on the sub-genre did not come about overnight. There are many precursors to both Tsukamoto and Fukui's work that also need to be addressed. Some are quite well known to western audiences whilst others have yet to get the recognition that they deserve in helping to create one of the most fascinating and philosophical phases in contemporary Japanese cinema.

Whilst the ideas of cyberpunk in the West were born out of literature, Japanese cyberpunk, it could be argued, was born out of music. During the late seventies and early eighties, Tokyo was enjoying an incredibly vibrant underground punk music scene. An ethos that later branched out into art and cinema thanks largely to one individual: Sogo Ishii.

Born in 1957, Ishii quickly built a reputation of being somewhat of a maverick and grew to be a prominent figure of the Tokyo underground filmmaking scene. Operating within the gathering rubble of a collapsing studio system, Ishii turned out a variety of zero-budget 8mm film projects at a time when former international filmmaking heavyweights such as Akira Kurosawa were struggling to find financial investment.

Early feature film efforts such as Panic High School (1978) and Crazy Thunder Road (1980) encapsulated the rebellion and anarchy associated with punk and went on to become highly influential in underground film circles. Crazy Thunder Road in particular pointed the way forward with its biker-gang punk aesthetic; a style that would be explored later in Otomo's highly influential Akira. Originally made as a university graduation project, it was picked up for distribution by major studio Toei, making Ishii the first of his generation to move from amateur filmmaking into the professional industry while still a university student [ 1 ].

After Crazy Thunder Road, Ishii made the frenetic short film Shuffle (1981) - interestingly, an unofficial adaptation of a Katsuhiro Otomo comic strip - as well as a slew of music and concert videos for a variety of Japanese punk bands. However, Toei soon returned, offering Ishii studio backing for his next feature film project. This new financial investment resulted in Ishii's most influential work to date; Burst City (1982), a film that encapsulated and epitomised his favourite subject matter: the punk movement.

No other film captured the intensity, pessimism, delinquency and the do-it-yourself bravado of Japan's punk movement like Ishii's Burst City; a bold, brash and anarchic time-capsule of early eighties zeitgeist. However, despite its overwhelming influence - not only did it shape the conventions of Japanese cyberpunk, but the future of contemporary Japanese cinema as a whole - Burst City remains largely unappreciated. It is frequently overshadowed by its higher profile, more internationally renowned followers: Tsukamoto, Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano among others, all of whom are indebted to Ishii's work in some shape or form.

However, Ishii has always played the rebel: attending his filmmaking class at Nihon University only when he needed to borrow more equipment; dropping off the filmmaking radar for long stretches of time; making films of a commercially unviable length such as the 55-minute Electric Dragon 80,000V (2001) and challenging conventional moviegoers with his early punk films only then to defy the fans of that work with calm, hypnotic efforts such as August in the Water (1995) and Labyrinth of Dreams (1997). It is this ethos that drives Burst City; steering it through the deserted Tokyo highways and barren industrial wastelands that make up its initial exposition and into the anarchic meltdown of its closing act.

The visual aesthetic of Burst City is an eclectic mix of punk, industrialisation and post-apocalyptic wasteland imagery reminiscent of the first two Mad Max films (1979 & 1981), with some science fiction trimmings; the futuristic cannons used by the Battle Police to disperse riots for instance. However, Burst City acts beyond the usual genre trappings. It has the immediacy and atmosphere of a documentary, chronicling both the people and the music, whilst using the surrounding dystopian backdrop as a metaphor for the anxiety, haplessness and alienation as experienced by Japan's youth at the time. This documentary feel is further enhanced by Ishii's groundbreaking use of camera. His highly dynamic, handheld, almost stream-of-consciousness style shots interwoven with equally aggressive, machinegun editing not only captures the energy and restlessness of the music - which is very prominent here - but would highly influence Tsukamoto and the execution of his work.

The film's industrialised environments - the abandoned warehouses and run-down boiler rooms where the biker gangs and punk bands reside - would become a key aspect for the Japanese cyberpunk look as well as depicting Tokyo as little more than a concrete slum. The notion of the metropolis as oppressive entity starts to become apparent here and it's interesting to note that this film was made in the same year as Blade Runner, which again, displays similar connotations [ 2 ].

Ishii's prior involvement with the punk movement allowed him to gather an impressive ensemble of real-life Japanese punk bands - The Rockers, The Roosters and The Stalin among others - as part of the cast, as well as 1970s folk singer/songwriter Shigeru Izumiya. Interestingly, Izumiya was also credited as a Planner and the film's Art Director, suggesting that he had a strong involvement in shaping Burst City's influential aesthetic. This serves as a vital link as Izumiya would go on to write and direct his own film; a film that would go on to crystallise many of the conventions and ideas of Japanese cyberpunk that would later be explored by Tsukamoto and Fukui.

Shigeru Izumiya's Death Powder (1986) introduces the unorthodox visuals and abstract delivery that would prove instrumental in future Japanese cyberpunk execution. Like Burst City, sound also plays a vital part here; further laying the foundations for the sensory assault aspect of the movement that would later be championed and refined by Tsukamoto. Izumiya, like Ishii, is from a musical background; a popular folk singer/songwriter as well as a film composer - he wrote the music for Ishii's breakthrough feature Crazy Thunder Road.

Lost in public domain purgatory for decades, Death Powder barely exists, available on bootleg DVD and only recently as video segments on the internet [ 3 ]. Western understanding of the film has been largely incoherent and underwhelming due to bad and partial translation into English and as a result, Death Powder is frequently overlooked. However, its influence is unmistakably clear and it's arguably the first film of Japan's extreme cyberpunk movement, exemplifying the invasive, corporeal surrealism that would follow over the next ten years.

Set in present or near-future Tokyo, the film follows a group of researchers who have in their possession Guernica; a feminine, cybernetic android capable of spewing poisonous dust from its mouth. Karima (played by Izumiya) is left to guard the android but appears to lose his mind, attacking the other two - Noris and Kiyoshi - when they return. Kiyoshi inhales some of Guernica's powder and starts to mutate as a result. He also starts hallucinating as their subconscious starts to merge. One sequence entitled "Dr. Loo Made Me" - which suggests that the android is trying to communicate with Kiyoshi - sees the Guernica project in its early stages featuring the three researchers as well as the eccentric Dr. Loo, the guitar wielding head of the operation. The hallucinations provide Kiyoshi with further omniscience, detailing Karima's apparent love for Guernica as well as the research group's ongoing struggle with the 'scar people'; men disfigured as their flesh deteriorates uncontrollably.

The subject of flesh, the boundary between life and death and the notion of what it means to be human come into play regularly as the film drifts from one surrealist situation to another. Death Powder poses the question: if you cease to have flesh, do you cease to be human? This is an idea that is routinely explored in cyberpunk but while western examples such as Blade Runner and Neuromancer focus on larger-scale implications, Death Powder - and most of Japan's subsequent cyberpunk output for that matter - looks at the changes within the individual. With the former; invasive technologies are not only fully realised, but have been successfully integrated into society, thus becoming common practice. The technologies explored in the latter however, are still in their primordial stages; they are works in progress and extremely esoteric, and as a result, extremely volatile and unpredictable.

Death Powder also establishes Japanese cyberpunk's tendency to place imagery ahead of its narrative, a fundamental aspect of the no-holds barred sensory assault style that they exhibit. As a result, story and purpose are evinced from what is seen as opposed to what is told, allowing subsequent films a tonal and philosophical quality. Like many similar spirited films that would follow, Death Powder highlights the destructive and dehumanising nature of technology. A big clue comes in the form of the android Guernica sharing the same name as Pablo Picasso's famous 1937 painting that depicts the bombing of Guernica by Nazi warplanes (in support of Franco) during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso's mural shows an orgy of twisted bodies, animals and buildings, deformed by war, or more broadly, the deviant technologies that power it. The film's end sees the cast fused and writhing in an ocean of monstrous flesh; the human form consumed and destroyed at the hands of intervening science.

Despite Death Powder's aesthetic and thematic influence, it went by with little fanfare and was never seen outside of Japan until years later. The subsequent, similar minded Android of Notre Dame (Kuramoto; 1988) fared slightly better, partly due to the infamy that surrounded the film series it was part of, a seven-film collection known as the Guinea Pig Series; short exploitation features that focused on torture, murder and other destructive processes, designed to appear realistic and snuff-like [ 4 ]. Android of Notre Dame failed to strike a chord with wider audiences and has since wallowed in cult obscurity along with its filmic brethren. However, this all changed as Japanese cyberpunk began to creep into the international spotlight with the anime feature film adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's popular manga series, Akira (1988).

Although this writing focuses mainly on live-action cyberpunk output, Akira's arrival was so important and influential to the sub-genre that it needs to be acknowledged. Akira achieved two things: first; it opened up and, almost single-handedly, popularised anime and manga for global audiences (especially in the UK and US) and second; it perpetuated the cyberpunk ethos on perhaps the largest scale to date - combining the neon-lit, high-technology/low-living metropolis of Blade Runner and Neuromancer with body horror overtones. The film condensed the vast narrative of Otomo's gargantuan, six-part magnum opus into a streamlined, two-hour feature directed by Otomo himself. It is a milestone within Japanese cyberpunk as it was the first of the sub-genre to not only have commercial success domestically, but also managed to find an audience overseas.

Set within the destitute overcrowding of futuristic Neo Tokyo, the story revolves around juvenile biker thugs and best friends Kaneda and Tetsuo. During a turf spat with a rival gang, Tetsuo crashes but is mysteriously taken away by military and scientific officials. They experiment on him with chemically altering drugs, turning Tetsuo into a psycho-kinetic demigod with uncontrollable power. He goes on a destructive rampage through the city to seek an audience with Akira, a highly powerful entity that destroyed the old Tokyo decades before.

Part of Akira's success inevitably lies in its attention to detail and vaulting ambition. The budget was astronomical for an anime feature at the time - around 1,100,000,000 [ 5 ] - acquired through the partnership of several major Japanese media companies including Toho and Bandai. It avoided the corner cutting of anime projects in the past, producing hundreds of thousands of animation cells to create fluid motion - particularly in its many action set-pieces - and capture nuances that would've otherwise not existed. Otomo also went to the trouble of doing lip-synched sound recording; a first for anime, resulting in extremely high and rich production values. The film set box office records for an anime in Japan during its summer 1988 release, grossing over 6,300,000,000 [ 6 ]. Internationally, it got a limited theatrical run in America and the United Kingdom soon after - sowing the seeds for the immense western cult fanbase that it enjoys to this day - but failed to get home video distribution until the early nineties.

Themes of mutation, modernity and social unrest are rife. Kaneda and Tetsuo's biker gang are like a revved up version of the delinquents seen in Ishii's Crazy Thunder Road and Burst City, while Tetsuo's ESP and subsequent transformation sets the film firmly in Cronenberg's body horror territory. His eventual fusion with metal - resulting in a horrific man-machine hybrid that sees Tetsuo become the master of a newly formed universe - not only is evocative of the cyberpunk notion of technology corrupting the human form (in this case literally) but also serves as an important visual precursor to the movement's next breakthrough, live-action work.

Often revered as the definitive example of extreme Japanese cyberpunk and a vital cornerstone in the rebuilding of contemporary Japanese cinema, Tetsuo: The Iron Man was a baffling international success story, prompting many a sceptic on Japan's future cinematic involvement to turn their attention eastward. Barely over an hour in length, Tetsuo was a breath of fresh air; a no-holds-barred sensory assault that gave Japanese cinema a major image renovation and launched the career of its director, Shinya Tsukamoto, who has gone on to become one of the country's most respected and treasured auteurs.

During its unprecedented and lengthy tour of international film festivals, Tetsuo not only pointed towards exciting new possibilities for contemporary Japanese cinema but was able to fit 'snugly into a pantheon of genre works that included Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, James Cameron's The Terminator, David Lynch's Eraserhead and the work of David Cronenberg, Sam Raimi and Clive Barker'[ 7 ], which no doubt broadened its appeal. Its use of kinetic cinematography, rapid-fire editing and DIY, zero-budget special effects served as an invitation; a call to arms if you will, for independent filmmakers everywhere to produce unique and challenging cinema.

However, the majority of the film's innovative style is, for the most part, lifted from elsewhere, promoting the fusion of a variety of influences including the hyperactive camerawork of Ishii's Burst City; the body horror of Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986); the biomechanical perversions of artist H.R. Giger; the literature of J.G. Ballard - particularly Crash (1973) - and the stop-motion animation of Jan Svankmayer. There is also a sense of strange nostalgia for the old kaiju (monster) movies and television serials that Tsukamoto watched when growing up in a Tokyo experiencing post-war re-construction as well as major expansion and modernising in preparation for the Japan hosting of the 1964 Olympic Games.

Like Ishii, Tsukamoto's early development stemmed from making 8mm films as a teenager during the 1970s, using his younger brother and friends as cast and crew members. As he reached adulthood, Tsukamoto abandoned filmmaking and turned his attention increasingly towards the stage, forming a theatre troupe with like minded university students and directing plays [ 8 ]. One of the plays that Tsukamoto wrote would subsequently be adapted into a film; The Adventure of Denchu Kozo (1987) with the assistance of his theatre cohorts - christened 'Kaiju Theatre'. It was this same group that also made Tetsuo, along with a revolving-door line-up of other helpers, most notably fellow filmmaker Shozin Fukui who would go to make his own cyberpunk features during the nineties.

Tetsuo's chief concern is the impact of technology on society and subsequently - and more specifically - the human form. Tsukamoto suggests that technology is a disease, bursting forth unannounced and unexplained as evidenced in the salaryman's transformation - simultaneously reminiscent of Cronenberg's The Fly and Otomo's Akira - where a shard of metal lodged in the protagonist's cheek is the starting point for further mutation. Like Seth Brundle of The Fly, the salaryman is both repulsed yet intrigued by what he is turning into and, coincidently, his evolution shares the namesake of the transforming character of Akira: Tetsuo; meaning 'iron man' or 'clear thinking/philosophical man'. Tsukamoto embraces both interpretations of his film's title. On one hand is the literal transformation of flesh to iron and on the other, a philosophical enquiry on technology's consuming nature and the symbiosis between city and citizen.

However, closer inspection reveals further concerns, as evidenced by Steven T. Brown, author of the groundbreaking Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture, in which he says: 'the mixing of flesh and metal in Tetsuo is not only intensely violent but also darkly erotomechanical and techno-fetishistic, evoking sadomasochistic sexual practices and pleasures, as well as fears of both male and female sexuality out of control'[ 9 ].

In this regard, Tsukamoto gives horror and eroticism equal attention: the salaryman has a nightmare involving his girlfriend (played by Kei Fujiwara) sodomising him with a mechanical, snakelike appendage strapped to her crotch. This gender-reversal is not only representative of one of David Cronenberg's favourite thematic stomping grounds, but also shares the Canadian director's Ballardian [ 10 ] allusions, hyper-masculinity and homoerotic undertones. When the film's antagonist, Yatsu (meaning 'Guy') - a metal fetishist (played by Tsukamoto himself) suffering from the same man-machine affliction - arrives at the apartment, he turns up 'presenting flowers to the salaryman in a parody of courtship'[ 11 ] that ends with physical assimilation.

This mechanical eros continues when, in an early stage of his transformation, the salaryman's penis turns into a rapidly oscillating drill which he then uses on his girlfriend with graphic results. By the film's end, he does battle and fuses together with the metal fetishist; the result is a large tank-like monstrosity with the suggested goal of world domination. His newfound unrepressed nature effectively destroys his heterosexual relationship, only to start a new one with someone - another male - experiencing similar changes to their body.

The film's metaphorical capacity is achieved primarily through its abstract and surrealist execution that bears similarities to Luis Buuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) - as noted by Brown in Tokyo Cyberpunk (p.60-64) - and David Lynch's Eraserhead. The latter is a popular comparison, prompting many to refer to Tetsuo as a "Japanese Eraserhead". Whilst both films share an allegiance to post-humanism and industrialised iconography, Eraserhead takes a slower burning, atmospheric approach. Tetsuo on the other hand, takes a startlingly aggressive stance from the outset; combining hand-held camerawork, rapid fire editing and a pummelling, industrial music score by composer Chu Ishikawa - who would serve as composer for future Tsukamoto projects - to create a battering and invasive sensory assault. It was an ethos that would carry over into the next decade of underground filmmaking.

After completing his second feature, the manga adaptation Hiruko the Goblin (1990), Tsukamoto returned to the world of mutated scrap with a second Tetsuo film. Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer (1992) serves more as a companion piece than as a straightforward sequel or remake. It is a new interpretation of the same basic premise - man-machine transformation - but played out on a larger scale. Tomorowo Taguchi reprises his role as a (different) salaryman. This time, he lives in a sterile, high-rise apartment with his wife and young son. His metamorphosis is triggered when his son is kidnapped by an underground faction of skinheads who want to harness the salaryman's cyber-kinetic powers so that they can augment their bodies into organic weaponry in order to bring about mass destruction.

If the ethos of the first Tetsuo was related to The Fly, the second film perhaps bears more of a similarity to Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) as the salaryman comes to blows against his mutated brother (played by Tsukamoto), the leader of the skinhead group. In doing so, Body Hammer moves away from the surreal macabre horror of its predecessor and more towards an action/science fiction movie template; although plenty of avant-garde trimmings still remain to bridge, connect and embellish ideas. As a result, Tsukamoto operates within a somewhat more conventional and ultimately, more accessible narrative structure, and the inclusion of a larger budget means that he is able to fully realise the end-of-the-world scenario suggested in the closing moments of the first film. As per Tsukamoto's wish, Tokyo is razed to the ground.

Like the first film, Body Hammer blurs the distinction between form and content. It also re-imagines concepts that were given little attention the first time around; the metal fetishist's obsession with physical perfection as suggested by the photos of successful athletes that adorn his shack like abode is 'brought very much to the foreground in the shape of the skinhead cult, which consists of athletes, bodybuilders and boxers who push their training regimen to the extreme' [ 12 ] - a topic that would dominate Tsukamoto's subsequent film project. It's a possible indictment of the obsessive, body culture phenomenon that came about in the 1980s that saw more and more people going to the gym and taking advantage of artificial enhancements such as plastic surgery; a time when there was a strong emphasis on physical perfection and beauty.

The film also hints at the direction Tsukamoto would start to take with future productions: the environmental focus has shifted ever so slightly from the decaying urban sprawl to the sterile functionality of the metropolis centre, and more of an emphasis has been placed on the relationship between the salaryman and his wife; a marriage torn apart by invasive elements. The catalyst for transformation this time is not from infection or a curse as suggested in the original, but from demonstrative rage. The prospect of the salaryman's son being killed by the skinheads provokes the first instance of transformation, which occurs again when his wife is kidnapped, causing multiple gun-barrels to erupt from his chest and limbs. Rage would go on to transform Tsukamoto's protagonists in future films Tokyo Fist (1995) and Bullet Ballet (1998), albeit figuratively instead of literally.

In the wake of Tetsuo's startling domestic and international success, one would think that it would have acted as a catalyst to trigger a wave of similarly styled films. In retrospect, this wasn't the case as very few filmmakers decided to follow the path forged by Tsukamoto's breakthrough work. However, former colleague Shozin Fukui was one of the few to accept the challenge.

Like Tsukamoto and Izumiya before him, Fukui is a disciple of Sogo Ishii's breakthrough independent filmmaking during the late seventies as well as the music that inspired it. Born in 1961, and upon moving to Tokyo in the early eighties, Fukui quickly became infatuated with the burgeoning underground punk music scene and set about forming his own band with friends. These same friends would serve as Fukui's cast and crew on early forays into filmmaking such as Metal Days (1986) and the short films Gerorisuto (1986) and Caterpillar (1988) [ 13 ].

After serving as assistant director to both Tsukamoto and Ishii - on Tetsuo: The Iron Man and the short film The Master of Shiatsu (Shiatsu Oja, 1989) respectively - Fukui started to write and direct his own feature films. His first was Pinocchio 964 (1991), and while it did not share the same philosophical leanings that Tetsuo did two years before, it was an effective manifesto for Fukui's thematic preoccupations nonetheless; how technological augmentation impacts on the fragile and potentially volatile nature of the human mind. The story focuses on the titular protagonist, a brainwashed individual who has been scientifically modified to operate as a sex slave. Upon being thrown away by his sexually demanding female owners, Pinocchio wonders the streets of present-day Tokyo where he meets Himiko, a fellow destitute. She takes Pinocchio under her wing whereby he begins to fall in love with her, prompting the return of previously erased memories. When Pinocchio realises what has happened to him and knows who's responsible, he plans revenge. Meanwhile, the corporation in question organise a search party to reclaim their missing product.

Pinocchio 964 is frequently compared to Tetsuo by cyberpunk enthusiasts and academics alike. Both films represent the feature length debut of Fukui and Tsukamoto respectively and both films exhibit a similarly energetic and manic execution. It can be argued that Fukui's style is indebted to Tsukamoto due to his serving as assistant director for a period of Tetsuo's filming. Fukui's previous short, Caterpillar - made at around the same time as Tetsuo - features similar techniques including hyperactive, hand-held camerawork and stop-motion animation as well as similar imagery: mounds of scrap, ubiquitous urban living and flesh merged with machinery.

However, there are some major differences. The most apparent is inherent in the film's mise en scene: Pinocchio 964 is in colour (except for its opening sequence) whereas Tetsuo is black and white - though its sequel was in colour. Thematically, unlike Tsukamoto's notion of technology as an organic, mutating disease, Fukui's film depicts the body transformed as the direct result of man-made augmentation similar to early Cronenberg - Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977) for example - as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Like the monster in Shelley's seminal work, Pinocchio is at first oblivious to his condition, but time spent in the real world causes him to realise his artificial existence and he seeks revenge against his creator. However, unlike Frankenstein's monster, Pinocchio was not constructed from scratch; he is his namesake in reverse - a human turned product through neuro tampering and memory wiping. Fukui seems to suggest that modernity is programming the populous to concern themselves with nothing but sex; a sentiment that's readily apparent in the media and advertising industries.

It could be argued then, that Pinocchio 964 is the more precise cyberpunk text, offering a speculative stance on potential future technologies i.e. altered living through cybernetic assistance. As suggested in Tetsuo, these technological changes have a perverse impact on sex; Pinocchio is compelled to suckle on Himiko's breasts in a brain-damaged, baby like stupor - not knowing any better - whereas the salaryman's girlfriend is enticed and drawn to ride her lover's newly developed drill-penis.

The conclusion of Pinocchio 964 sees further transformation beyond the esoteric boundaries as previously established. Like the salaryman and metal fetishist, Pinocchio and Himiko - both of whom are victims of the corporation's scientific dalliances - merge together in a manner and style reminiscent of Peter Jackson's first lo-fi feature Bad Taste (1987), suggesting the start of a new, technologically altered meta-race in keeping with Cronenberg's corporeal philosophy of the "New Flesh" [ 14 ].

Thanks to Tetsuo's worldwide success - along with other newly emerging work like Takashi Kitano's gritty police caper Violent Cop (1989) - Pinocchio 964 enjoyed a modicum of cult success as international demand for strange and ultra-violent Japanese cinema began to increase. Film companies such as Toho started to cater to this newfound interest by introducing direct-to-video distribution lines that specialised in outputting low-budget, sensationalist material. One such entry was Tomoo Haraguchi's specifically titled Mikadroid: Robokill Beneath Disco Club Layla (1991), a cyber/steampunk horror about a buried, technologically augmented, super-soldier - built by Japanese scientists during the second world war - being re-activated and going on a murderous rampage. Largely unheard of, the film is perhaps most notable for featuring a (brief) acting turn from a then little-known Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who would later go on to direct internationally renowned works such as Cure (1997), Pulse (2001) and Tokyo Sonata (2008).

Both Pinocchio 964 and Mikadroid would be overshadowed by Tsukamoto's higher budget and higher profile Tetsuo sequel, which arrived the following year. In the meantime, Fukui was already planning the next project; one that would take almost five years to gestate and execute.

The result was Rubber's Lover (1996), Fukui's second and, at present, last feature; a subterranean post-industrial nightmare of human experimentation and bodily destruction. A clandestine group of scientists experiment on human guinea pigs pinched from the street to unlock psychic powers. This is achieved through a combination of computer interfaces, sensory depravation and regular injections of ether, usually resulting in the subject dying a gruesome and explosive death.

Often interpreted as a lose prequel to Pinocchio v946, Rubber's Lover, despite similarities to its predecessor also represents a distinct contrast. The most readily apparent differences are the film's use of monochrome photography - a decision made by Fukui when he disliked the look of the S&M flavoured costumes when filmed in colour - and the film's comparatively subdued pace; favouring atmosphere over propulsion. However, his pre-established tropes still remain: invasive technologies; bizarre sexual practices as a by-product of such technologies; retrograde/outdated equipment; mutation; and a fetish for bodily fluids - pus, blood, vomit etc.

Like Tetsuo, Rubber's Lover depicts the establishment of a new world order through corporeal and technologically informed symbiosis: the biological co-existence between flesh and metal and the destruction of mental and physical barriers respectively. Rubber's Lover also takes great pleasure in distorting the boundaries and exploring the grey area between sex and violence; much more so than Pinocchio 964. One scene sees a frenzied character tearing the flesh off another, mid-coitus on a hospital bed whilst a corporate scumbag laughs in the corner of the room. The researcher's successful test subject, Motomiya - a former member of the team who has since become addicted to ether - is made to wear a strange, rubber S&M bodysuit, further augmented with makeshift technological add-ons of monitors, wires and outdated gizmos. Their nurse's rotating, ether injector is especially phallic and is used on their subjects rectally for "immediate effect", suggesting a notion of perversion that transcends sex and violence and into the realms of science and technology.

Rubber's Lover's perverted view on science not only echoes some of the imagery and themes from Izumiya's Death Powder (and to a lesser extent, Haraguchi's Mikadroid) but the real-life, deranged human experiments carried out by the Japanese military's infamous Unit 731 on Chinese prisoners of war during the 1930s and 40s [ 15 ]; depicting a doomsday scenario that sees the human race tear itself apart in the pursuit of scientific understanding and technological superiority. Motomiya's ether addiction is caused by one of his research colleagues. The same colleague later kidnaps and rapes a representative of the project's benefactor sent in to oversee its shutdown. She is also subjugated to D.D.D (Direct Digital Drive), the apparatus used in the project's testing.

Fukui's fascination over the frailty and destructibility of the human mind comes to fruition as Motomiya quickly turns mad; burdened with newly unlocked psychic powers that he can't control. Like Pinocchio 964, Rubber's Lover examines the mental transformation that invasive technologies incur on the human condition. This is in stark contrast to Tsukamoto's Tetsuo films that focus primarily on the physical transformation caused by the same factors, which perhaps serves as the key difference between their otherwise similar films within the sub-genre.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, Japanese cyberpunk cinema was starting to wane; having been overtaken by the blood-stained yakuza films of Kitano and Miike in terms of international prominence, who would in turn be overshadowed by the new wave of supernatural, J-Horror films that emerged at the turn of the century including Hideo Nakata's The Ring (1998) and Ring 2 (1999).

Fukui's Rubber's Lover was the last underground cyberpunk film of the nineties and arguably the last ever. Upon its completion and after getting a limited video release, Fukui put filmmaking on hold to join a video production company; he worked there for the best part of ten years. Tsukamoto had moved on also, continuing his exploration of the symbiosis between city and citizen with a matured pallet. His films Tokyo Fist (1995) and Bullet Ballet (1998) eschew virtually all of the science fiction and horror imagery that had characterised his work previously.

Cyberpunk was kept alive within Japan's anime and manga industries but it wasn't until the turn of the millennium when it returned to cinema. The year 2001 saw the release of two films that would give the genre a new lease of life. Mamoru Oshii made Avalon, a live-action Japanese/Polish co-production about an addictive virtual simulation game. It was Oshii's first film since his internationally successful anime feature film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (1995) - he would go on to direct the sequel; Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004).

Shot in Poland with Polish actors and a Japanese crew, Avalon's themes of virtual reality places it in the same territory as a lot of American produced cyberpunk that surfaced during the nineties: The Lawnmower Man (1992), Strange Days (1995), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), The Matrix (1999) and Cronenberg's similarly concerned eXistenZ (1999) for example. It was also redolent of many similarly themed anime releases - both theatrical and televised - that emerged during the same decade as the real-life phenomenon of the internet started to make the world seem even smaller; Oshii's own adaptation of Ghost in the Shell and Ryutaro Nakamura's Serial Experiments: Lain (1998) series were particularly indicative of these technological and cultural changes. Another notable example and precursor to much of the VR-centric work that would appear in the 1990s is the four-part anime series Megazone 23 (1985-1989), which explores the idea of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo existing as a futuristic virtual simulation.

The second film from 2001 was Sogo Ishii's Electric Dragon 80,000V, which not only served as Ishii's return to punk cinema after a decade of more meditative output but, like Burst City, spearheaded a new generation of like minded filmmaking that has evolved Japanese cyberpunk into a new and strange beast. As with the sensory assault cinema favoured by Tsukamoto and Fukui, Electric Dragon is a film that is experienced rather than watched, stimulating the most primitive parts of the brain in a tsunami of sound and image.

The premise is simple enough; a young boy contracts the ability to channel and wield electricity, acquired from a childhood accident whilst climbing some power lines - an ability further enhanced by receiving multiple jolts of electro-shock therapy for violent behaviour. Now an adult with megawatts of power coursing through him, Dragon Eye Morrison is a professional reptile investigator, searching alleyways for lost lizards. Equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of Thunderbolt Buddha, a TV repair man turned vigilante whose electro-conductive talents are the result of mechanical wizardry. The two meet and battle for supremacy on Tokyo's rooftops.

As was the case with Burst City, Electric Dragon leans less towards the cyber and more towards the punk aspect of the sub-genre, with Ishii following the train of thought he employed with his music videos and concert films during the 1980s. The film's title also makes reference to the old days, partly derived from 'Live Spot 20,000V', the concert venue that plays a pivotal role in Burst City and one of Ishii's early shorts, The Solitude of One Divided by 880,000 (1978). Electric Dragon is less about the nightmare and more about anarchic expression at odds with the post-modern universe.

However, some cyber signifiers do remain; the oppressive Tokyo setting realised in stark monochrome; the fetishist attitude towards power lines, aerials, ventilation ducts and other ubiquitous technological appliances; the hyperactive and frequently expressionist delivery; its low-budget, guerrilla-like execution and, like Tetsuo, the concept of two characters augmented through technology, giving them powers that they can't fully control, coming to blows. Dragon Eye Morrison has to clamp himself to a metal bed frame at night whilst Thunderbolt Buddha's penchants for electronic devices to assist in his nocturnal excursions sometimes get the better of him as he fights for control of his own body.

The psycho-sexual themes that dominated past Japanese cyberpunk have been replaced with an equally primal notion of animal magnetism. Morrison's electric power is derived from the 'Dragon' that's embedded in all living things. His rage unlocks the strength of the dragon, meaning that he can harness more energy by sucking it out of household appliances or by creating a non-melodic racket on his electric guitar; a high-voltage cacophony of noise and expression announcing that Ishii's punk spirit is still alive and well. Indeed, lead actor Tadanobu Asano occasionally guests in Ishii's industrial noise-punk ensemble Mach 1.67, which provided the film's propulsive soundtrack. The film would later be used to accompany the group's live shows, a strategy Ishii pioneered back in 1983 when he made the short film Asia Strikes Back - a little-known cyberpunk piece that provided the template for Shozin Fukui's preferred set-up of underground experiments gone haywire - to back up the album and tour of the short-lived punk supergroup The Bacillus Army.

Similar to Tsukamoto's Tetsuo, dialogue in Electric Dragon 80,000V is minimal thus the narrative is powered mainly by image and follows a similar template; the protagonist is seen acquiring his power; the antagonist then challenges the protagonist to combat and the final act sees them clash. All of this is wrapped up in a high energy, fatless sixty-minute package. Ishii's film is not only is a throwback to the eighties cyberpunk manifesto but reminds us that rather than being characterised by heavy, science fiction concepts, as was the case in the West, it was defined by its independence, attitude and the will to create something out of nothing.

In the years following Electric Dragon 80,000V, a new wave of low-budget horror/science fiction began to surface largely thanks to increased DVD distribution channels, cheaper production techniques and the ever increasing reach of the internet. Films like Hellevator: The Bottled Fools (Hiroki Yamaguchi, 2004), Meatball Machine (Yudai Yamaguchi & Junichi Yamamoto, 2005), The Machine Girl (Noboru Iguchi, 2008) and Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008) have ushered in a new era of cyberpunk informed, gore-centric movies that have since been termed 'splatter-punk'.

These splatter-punk movies share the same independent spirit of their precursors, substituting 8mm and 16mm film methods for cheap DV technology, retaining as much budget as possible for make-up, costume and practical effects. Many of the effects in these films depict mutation and body alteration; splatter re-imaginings of the flesh-metal fusions of Tetsuo, and the perverse, organic weaponry of Tetsuo II. Similar to the "splatstick" horror of early Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, the effects and transformations lean towards the ridiculous for comedic effect. One mutated character in Tokyo Gore Police wields an oversized cannon made of contorted flesh, protruding from his crotch much like an erect penis, suggesting - in a very tongue-in-cheek manner - the blur between sex and violence that was posited by Tsukamoto and Fukui. Yamaguchi and Yamamoto's Meatball Machine is perhaps the closest to the Japanese cyberpunk of old; parasitic aliens infect unsuspecting people, which promptly turns them into macabre man-machine teratoids that fight it out.

In many ways, this 'splatter-punk' phase is also reminiscent of the special-effects race that occurred with American horror movies during the 1980s; Cronenberg included. As practical effects became more advanced, a seemingly never-ending slew of films were produced, trying to out-shock one another with advancing exercises in gore. The same can be said here; the ante seems to be continually raised as each new release contorts and morphs the body in increasingly elaborate and grotesque ways.

A reason for this is that many of these film's directors initially came from special effects backgrounds: Tokyo Gore Police director Yoshihiro Nishimura for instance, has supervised the special effects for many modern gore productions including Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl and Robo-Geisha (2009). In fact, many of these films are made through Fundoshi Corps, a production company founded by Nishimura, Iguchi and film producer Yukihiko Yamaguchi, that specialise in cheaply produced, over-the-top movies of this ilk. It has proven to be a successful business model as their output is continually building a strong international fanbase, looking for perverse and outlandish content.

The recurring touchstones of combining eroticism and perversion are also present. However, they for the most part forego subverted techno-fetishism in favour of contemporary V-Cinema and Pink Film preoccupations. The Machine Girl for instance, uses typical imagery such as the Japanese schoolgirl - a popular conceit in a lot of the nation's anime, manga and pornography industries - and takes it to new abject levels, connecting bullet spewing hardware to her severed limbs and even granting her the ability to grow weaponry from out of the small of her spine; skirt raised of course.

Unfortunately, it would appear that live-action Japanese cyberpunk cinema has moved on from the daring, experimental underground from whence it came. The remnants of its ideas are now utilised in violent gore shockers that are bereft of the immediacy and philosophical potential of their progenitors. The movement, once an expression of attitude, concerns and frustration with the world, the way it's structured and the technology used - not just an exploration of the grey area between science fiction and horror - seems to have disappeared.

However in 2009, Shinya Tsukamoto announced his return to the world of cyberpunk with a third Tetsuo project. Tetsuo: The Bullet Man is not only a return, but a new beginning for Tsukamoto as it is his first English language film; an attempt to expose the demented world of Tetsuo to a wider audience. It premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival to mixed fanfare, prompting Tsukamoto to continue working on it. Subsequent showings - the 2010 Tribeca Festival for instance - have found greater critical favour, but a vital caveat still remains

Like the punk scene that it emulated, Japanese cyberpunk was pertinent and inextricably linked to a specific time and place. More than a sub-genre, it tackled the anxieties of the period in ways that conventional expression would fall short. But now that we're in the technologically dependent twenty-first century - the post-human nightmare now a grim reality - can it still be relevant?

Continued here:
Midnight Eye feature: Post-Human Nightmares The World of ...

All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.

Friedrich Nietzsche

http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/zarathustra.txt Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891)

. .

Robots will inherit the Earth

Marvin L. Minsky

Also in Liberalism Human rights is utter silliness. Human sanctity is crap!

James Watson

UCLA Conference on Human Genome Project (1998)

Our Post-Human Future as a Singularity!

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For a full list of PDF files click here.

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Wednesday, June 08, 2005 06:58 AM My First EVER of This Box! For full history see GloriousMaryMagdalene.doc [Later: A PDF document published by EveryScreen.com.doc] This entry is available in PDF format for handsome, ready and double-sided printing. Click the above icon to download the file.

For a full list of PDF files click here.

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See the article here:
Post-Human Civilization - EveryScreen.com

Stormwatch is a fictional superhero team appearing in American comic books published by WildStorm, which later became an imprint of DC Comics. Created by Jim Lee, the team first appeared in Stormwatch #1 (March 1993). After WildStorm became an imprint of DC Comics, the stories were set in the DC Universe, and the group was depicted as a secretive team of superheroes who tackle dangerous missions while remaining unknown to the larger superhero community.

Stormwatch (run by a fictional United Nations) is overseen from a satellite by its director, the Weatherman. The Weatherman was Henry Bendix, who had cybernetic implants connected to his brain to better monitor the world situation and his Stormwatch teams in action. His field commander was Jackson King (also known as Battalion), an African-American telekinetic. Other founding members include Hellstrike (an Irish police officer who is an energy being), Winter (an ex-Russian Spetznaz officer and an energy absorber), Fuji (a young Japanese man, an energy being trapped in a containment suit) and Diva (a young Italian woman with sonic powers).

Stormwatch began in the comic book Stormwatch, published by Image Comics and owned by Jim Lee. Early writers of Stormwatch included Jim Lee, Brandon Choi, H. K. Proger and Ron Marz; early artists included Scott Clark, Brett Booth, Matt Broome and Renato Arlem.

Marz, who had worked on Marvel Comics' Silver Surfer and developed Hal Jordan's Green Lantern replacement Kyle Rayner at DC Comics, took over the writing while James Robinson was writing WildC.A.T.s. Robinson and Marz, directed by Jim Lee, intertwined the books' storylines over several months.

Around this time, two two-issue miniseries were published: Stormwatch Team One (written by James Robinson) and WildC.A.T.s Team One (written by Steven Seagle). In the intertwined miniseries, the groundwork for both teams was laid in the mid-1960s by a core group consisting of Saul Baxter (Lord Emp), Zealot, Majestic, John Colt (the template for Spartan), Backlash, a young Henry Bendix and Jackson King's father Isaiah, all of whom would be members of (or figure prominently in) the later Stormwatch and WildC.A.T.s teams. In this series "WildStorm", the publishing imprint name, was a code word used by the United States Government: "Wild" was extraterrestrial life-forms, and "Storm" was invading forces.

Robinson's WildC.A.T.s and Marz's Stormwatch culminated in the Wildstorm Rising crossover, during which both teams were disrupted; Stormwatch incurred casualties, and the WildC.A.T.s were believed dead. After WildStorm Rising, Alan Moore took over the writing of WildC.A.T.s. After a second imprint-wide crossover, Warren Ellis took over writing Stormwatch with #37 (July 1996).

Ellis' version of Stormwatch injected sexual and horror elements, thinly-disguised political commentary and criticism of the United States government into the stories. The art was toned down from the more-exaggerated 1990s style which dominated the early Image Comics, allowing readers to take the book more seriously. During this period Ellis used Stormwatch to introduce the concept of the Bleed, a space between parallel universes which later featured in Planetary and other comics set in the Wildstorm Universe. By the end of volume one Ellis made Henry Bendix a manipulative villain, as Grant Morrison did with The Chief in DC's Doom Patrol.

Ellis continued to write the book into Stormwatch volume 2, until the August 1998 WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover (written by Ellis) saw the Stormwatch team decimated by xenomorphs (the creatures from the Alien film series). Most of the Stormwatch characters Ellis had not created were killed off in this story. A group of Stormwatch survivors became the main cast of Ellis' new series, The Authority, including his characters Jenny Sparks, Jack Hawksmoor, Apollo, the Midnighter, Swift (who debuted in Stormwatch vol. 1 #28, written by Jeff Mariotte) and two new characters who were successors of the Engineer and the Doctor from Ellis' Change or Die storyline. Stormwatch volume 2 ended with a story, set after WildC.A.T.s/Aliens, in which the United Nations disbanded Stormwatch. The last scene, a conversation between former members of Stormwatch Black, introduced The Authority and promoted its first issue. Other survivors from the original team (including Battalion, Christine Trelane, and Flint) appeared in The Authority, and King and Trelane became central characters of The Monarchy.

In the 11th issue of Planetary, another Ellis series in the same fictional universe, a secret agent (John Stone, modelled after the James Bond films and Jim Steranko's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comics) works for a 1960s precursor of Stormwatch: S.T.O.R.M., its command center known as S.T.O.R.M. Watch.

In September 2002, Stormwatch was revived as Stormwatch: Team Achilles, written by Micah Ian Wright. The series followed a human UN troubleshooting team dealing with superhuman-related problems. The planned final issue (#24) was never published, although its script is available for download online.[1]

Stormwatch was one of several comic books restarted after Wildstorm Comics' WorldStorm event. This version was launched in November 2006 with writer Christos Gage and penciller Doug Mahnke.[2][not in citation given] The series ended after issue #12,[3] but resumed in August 2008 as part of the Worlds End event with issue #13.[4] In the new series several dead characters (Hellstrike, Fuji, Winter and Fahrenheit) were resurrected and reformed as the new version of Stormwatch Prime (now sponsored by the United States), and a separate branch office Stormwatch: P.H.D. (Post-Human Division) was opened in New York.[5]

DC Comics announced in June 2011 that the team would be incorporated into the DC Universe in a new series, written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Miguel Sepulveda, as part of the September 2011 relaunch of its comics.[6]Peter Milligan took over the book in issue nine after leaving Justice League Dark with issue eight.[7]

This Stormwatch, an organization which has protected Earth from alien threats since the Dark Ages, is commanded by a group known as the Shadow Cabinet:[8] a four-member group of Shadow Lords[9] referred to as "the dead", and represented by an entity which can negate the group's powers and is aware of their secrets (except Harry's).[10] Rejecting the title "superheroes", Stormwatch Jack Hawksmoor, Apollo, Midnighter, Jenny Quantum, the Engineer, the Martian Manhunter (who left the team after wiping everyone's memory of him),[9] and three new characters: Adam One (an immortal born during the Big Bang,[11] who was later revealed to be Merlin),[12] Emma Rice,[13] the Projectionist (who controls the mass media) and Harry Tanner, the Eminence of Blades (the power to lie to anyone and be believed)[14] exist in secret and consider themselves professional soldiers. Their base is a hijacked Daemonite spaceship in Hyperspace,[15] later upgraded into the Carrier.[16]

Jim Starlin wrote Stormwatch with #19, erasing the team's history as a 1,000-year-old organization and restarting its history again. Apollo and Midnighter were returned to their original costumes as the core of a new Stormwatch team with the Engineer, Hellstrike, the Weird and new characters Jenny Soul, the Forecaster, and Force.[17] After Starlin's run ended with #29, Sterling Gates wrote the series' 30th and final issue which restored the previous version of the team.[18] The team then appeared in The New 52: Futures End weekly limited series.[19]

Ellis' run on Stormwatch was collected into five trade paperbacks:

Stormwatch: Team Achilles was collected into two trade paperbacks:

Stormwatch: Post-Human Divison was collected into four trade paperbacks:

The New 52 version of Stormwatch was collected into four trade paperbacks:

Read the original here:
Stormwatch (comics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Body, Post Humans and Cyborgs: The Influence of Politics of Identity and Emerging Digital and Bio-Technologies on Human Representation in Late 20th Century Art by Geri Wittig Since the advent of graphical browsers on the internet in 1993 and the subsequent explosion of the World Wide Web, the phenomenon of the internet has become increasingly visible in popular culture. It is not a truly popular medium, because although internet users, that is primarily web users, are becoming a far wider ranging demographic than the original government and academic internet user, it is still a rather limited group. However, it is a popular medium in that even if an individual has not actually been on the internet, with the proliferation of URL's popping up in advertising, publishing, and television, they are most likely aware of its existence and of the dialogue that surrounds its possible impact on society.

This changing demographic and popularization of the internet are having an impact on the nature of this communication network. New types of social interaction have been emerging on the internet and these developing social exchanges and structures are adding new layers to postmodern discourse. Enough time has passed for these phenomena to have been observed and analyzed by theorists in a variety of academic fields, including cultural studies, philosophy, media studies, sociology, art, etc., that the discourse around computer mediated communication is maturing and the literature related to computers in the cultural landscape is growing at a fast pace. The field of art and technology is increasingly moving into the sphere of activity that was largely dominated by photography during the 80's and early 90's, that is the arena in the artworld where postmodern discourse takes place.

Within the artworld of the '80s and the early '90s, a great deal of activity took place around the particular area of postmodern discourse known as the politics of identity. The politics of identity, with its emphasis on the politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and subject position was a rich area of production for many artists. High profile artists, such as Barbara Kruger and Jeff Koons, whose work was informed by the politics of identity, brought this discourse to the forefront of the artworld.

There was a great deal of focus put on the body in identity politics during this time period and this attention directed at the body was reflected in the artworld. The body continues to be a focus in artwork that addresses identity, but the representation of, attitude towards, and questions about, the human body and identity are changing as emerging technologies in the areas of telecommunications and biotechnology effect the discourse of identity politics.

There is currently a great deal of activity in the field of the cultural studies of science and technology concerning issues of identity in terms of post humans and cyborgs. These issues are emerging in the artworld as evidenced in three prominent international exhibitions that have taken place in the past few years: Post Human, an exhibition which began at the FAE Musee d'Art Contemporain, in France in the spring of 1992, traveled to Italy and Greece, then ended at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, in Hamburg, Germany in the spring of 1993; Documenta IX, in Kassel, Germany during the summer of 1992; and last year's Venice Biennale, Identity and Alterity. All three exhibitions, in their curatorial vision, contained some element of the impact of technology on human identity and raised questions about the post human condition.

The Post Human exhibition was primarily concerned with these issues. In his curatorial statement, Jeffrey Deitch states:

Social and scientific trends are converging to shape a new conception of self, a new construction of what it means to be a human being.1

Although the tone of the exhibition at times seemed somewhat sensational, the issues concerning advances in biotechnology, computer sciences and the accompanying changes in social behavior, that the exhibition draws attention to, are questions which are having an important impact on the politics of identity.

Jan Hoet, the curator of Documenta IX, reveals the anxiety that can be produced by the uncertainty of the impact of science and technology on human identity combined with an extreme postmodern theory that can be paralyzing in its relativity.

At a time when experiences are becoming less and less concrete - more virtual, in fact - only total intersubjectivity, only the awareness of specific concreteness and physicality, can provide a new impetus . . . Reassembly of atomized experiences, reorganization beyond all scientific systems; reconstruction of an existential sensory network: this must be among the aims of art. The body must be talked about once more; not physically but emotionally; not superficially but mentally; not as an ideal but in all its vulnerability.2

The Venice Biennale of 1995, points to questions of postmodern identity in its title, Identity and Alterity. The curator, Jean Clair, also draws attention to the uncertainty of this transitional time in society:

If this retrospective was to have meaning then it should be exploited as an opportunity to assay the validity of the theories that have been propounded during the course of this century. The last decade has seen the collapse of all the ideologies and utopias upon which the last one hundred years have fed.3

Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at MIT, speaks of this transitional period as a liminal moment:

. . . a moment when things are betwixt and between, when old structures have broken down and new ones have not yet been created. Historically, these times of change are the times of greatest cultural creativity; everything is infused with new meanings.4

The cyborg question is very complex as there is an incredible array of ways of categorizing cyborgs. There are many actual cyborgs among us in society. Anyone with an artificial organ, limb or supplement, such as a pacemaker, is a cyborg, but cyborg anthropology's concern is focused more on the social impact of human/machine integration and speaks more in terms of a cyborg society. Cyborg anthropology views the postmodern state as a mix of humans, eco-systems, machines and various complex softwares (from laws to the codes that control nuclear weapons) as one vast cybernetic organism.

Postmodern theory strongly informs the cultural studies of science and technology and the concept of the fluidity of identity and its manifestation in interactive narrative on the internet is a current topic of discourse. Sherry Turkle, who studied with Lacan in the late 60's, early 70's, describes in her most recent book, Life on the Screen, how theories that seemed right but abstract become clear in the context of computing. In computing, theories of constructing the self with language and the permeability of boundaries becomes manifest. Computing is made up of a set of languages. It is on the internet that the decentred nature of identity can be easily seen. Individuals who participate in interactive narrative on the internet can move through many selves while constructing a self and all this happens completely in text.

The artworld is now positioning itself to participate more fully in this discourse. Steps are taking place to bring the institutions and structures, that largely construct the high visibility artworld, further into the art and technology arena, particularly in the digital aspect. Institutions, such as SFMOMA and the Whitney in New York, have constructed web sites, some with project pages where interactive narrative art projects have the potential to take place. The high profile art magazines, where a great deal of art discourse takes place, are building their digital literacy. Art Forum has brought on R.U. Sirius, formerly of Mondo 2000, to write a bi-monthly column concerned with digital issues. In the April issue of Flash Art, "Aperto", Flash Art's new virtual exhibition, premiered with an exhibition called "Technofornia." These exhibitions which will highlight the art currently being shown in a particular city or region, exists as a cohesive exhibition only on the pages of Flash Art and its web site. As the artworld expands into the digital realm, the focus on remote humans embodied in real time digital systems will exist alongside the preoccupation with the body, as issues of organic vs. non-organic, post humans and cyborgs emerge to inform the politics of identity.

10/96

2 Roland Nachtigaller and Nicola von Velsen ed., Documenta IX, (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992), p. 18.

3 Identity and Alterity. Figures of the Body 1895-1995, (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1995), forward.

4 Pamela McCorduck, "Sex, Lies and Avatars," Wired, April, 1996, p.109.

Deitch, Jeffrey. Post Human. Amsterdam: Idea Books, 1992.

Documenta IX. Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992.

Hables Gray, Chris, ed. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1995.

la Biennale di Venezia 1995: Identity and Alterity. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1995.

Lunenfeld, Peter. "Technofornia." Flash Art, March-April, 1996,p. 69-71.

McCorduck, Pamela. "Sex, Lies and Avatars." Wired, April, 1996, p. 106-110, 158-165.

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.

Stryker, Susan. "Sex and Death Among the Cyborgs." Wired, May, 1996, p.134-136.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

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The Body, Post Humans and Cyborgs - Switch