ENG 670: WEEK FOUR
Media Ecologies +
Cyberpunk’s Landscape

TOPICS
 Digital humanities project
The potential of images, maps, models & soundscapes for ecocriticism
 Neuromancer Discussion
Cyberpunk & Cyberspace
 Research essay
 ALERT: Chris Jordan exhibit & public lectures

FOR NEXT WEEK
 Hayles, Chs. 1, 3 & 5, Electronic Literature
 Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness” (PDF)
 Review Stephanie Strickland’s “Slipping Glimpse” +
Lisa Robertson’s “The Weather”
 Examine 3 short e-texts on Hayles CD: “The Cape” by
JR Carpenter; “Accounts of the Glass Sky” by MD
Coverley; “Tao” by Reiner Strasser and Alan
Sondheim.

Digital Humanities Project
“At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple threeand four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.” – Chris Anderson

Group Project Assignment
“The focus of this digital humanities experiment is on the design of
the project, rather than on the completeness or perfection of its execution. You will be evaluated on how well you collaborate, involve each member of the group, outline your research question and methodology, and “test out” an alternative methodology for the literary analysis of an environmental question or problem.”
Feb. 1 st : Research question + methodology posted on blog
Feb. 15 th : Progress report in class
March 1 st : “Final” project uploaded to blog

Neuromancer: Discussion Threads
 Cyberpunk
 Geographies: Urban / outer / cyber spaces
? Imagining the end of nature?
 “The meat”: Embodiment, materiality + the environmental upshot of posthumanism

The Novel Schematized
Geographies
The sprawl
Tokyo (Chiba – Ninsei)
Freeside / Zion
Villa Straylight
Cyberspace
The matrix
Technologies
Decks
Prostheses
Nerve slicing
Eye replacements
Polycarbon suits
Simstim
Sense / Net
ICE/ icebre aker
Characters
Case, Molly (razor girl), Armitage/Colonel Corto,
Peter Riviera, Julius Deane, Linda Lee, The Finn,
Maelcum, Dixie Flatline/McCoy Pauley, Panther
Moderns, Lady 3Jane / Marie-France Tessier-
Ashpool, Wintermute AI, Neuromancer AI

1. Cyberpunk
(1) Covers for Neuromancer (2000, 2004)
(2) Posters for planned film adaptation of novel

Cyberpunk’s Archetypes
“Cyberpunk constitutes a kind of laboratory experiment in which the geographic-cultural light spectrum and bandwidths of the new system are registered. It is a literature of the stereotypes thrown up by a system in full expansion, which [. . .] sends out a variety of uncharted signals and signs of nascent communities and new and artificially differentiated ethnies.” (107)
- Fredric Jameson, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization” (2003)

Gibson’s Tokyo
"Tokyo has been my handiest prop shop for as long as I've been writing: sheer eye candy. You can see more chronological strata of futuristic design in a Tokyo streetscape than anywhere else in the world.” -Gibson, “My Own Private Tokyo,” 2001
"Tonight, watching the Japanese do what they do here, amid all this electric kitsch, all this randomly overlapped media, this chaotically stable neon storm of marketing hoopla, I've got my answer: Japan is still the future.” -Gibson, “My Own Private Tokyo,”
2001

Kogepan (“burnt bun”) character,
San-X company

2. Geographies: Urban / outer / cyber space
“The sheer material expansiveness of the metropolis, which in Neuromancer extends even into the extraterrestrial orbit of Freeside [. . .] is matched in another sense by the ubiquity of urban experience. It is this that
[Fredric] Jameson has in mind when he remarks upon the complementary ‘disappearance of Nature.’” (Myers 890)
- Tony Myers, “The Postmodern Imaginary in Neuromancer,” MFS
(2001)

Istanbul, Covered Bazaar, Kapali Carsi