week 9

Lecture: Cyber Punk

In this week’s lecture we spent time trying to define and undersdand the multiple different aspect of Cyberpunk.Cyberpunk can be seen as a science fiction genre of the society. It relates to topics like computers, genetics, body modification and corporate developments. Cyberpunk is define as a drastic evolution of technology in a futuristic perspective of our society. Authors of Cyberpunk want to implant a rebellion against authority and the ones who have the power and control the world or in minimal dimesion the ones who control our society.
Some themes of Cyberpunk are technology and mythology, utopia and distopia, Cities as machines, technological change and modernism to post modernism.
The second part of the lecture was dedicated to the projection of a French New Wave’s genre movie: La Jetee. This movie represents and uses all the techniques of the directors of the French New Wave time. The editing and montage of the film shows the will to show another reality through the camera.

Readings:

Burning Chrome by William Gibson:
This story is about a fictional world being exclusively controlled by computer. in this story hackers become a big threat as they have the control and try to steal everything they can using their abilities and knowledges of computers. I hav to admit that this text hasn’t been really easy to read and i did not understand everything.

Allegory of the cave by Plato :
This text is primarly talking about the human ablity to handle and perceive the truth and how it can be influenced and conditioned.. Plato’s in his text uses the example of people being kept as prisoners in a cave and only with a fire and shadows they create another reality. The mtaphore of this story is that we, humans, are prisoners and things that we perceive are the shadows projected on the wall,


Tutorial:
Time dedicated to the essay:
I chose to do my essay on the French New Wave and the revolution that happened between 1958 and 1964 for the Arts in general but i will focus more particularly on the cinema and the techniques used by directors( like Jean Luc Godard) to change a commercial industry and show a different reality to the audience. I will ,in overall, talk about the motivations behing the use of all these new techniques of filming and editing.