Technoculture

To grasp the emerging possibilities of new developments in the Internet of Toys, critical attention to the layered relationships of material technology and intangible imagination is needed. This chapter explores children's imaginative and playful engagement with toys that demonstrate AI or autonomous behaviour (here robots and virtual pets). It takes a workshop on the design of a new robotic gaming platform as a central case study. Close descriptive and analytical attention to moments of interaction with such toys is essential to fully grasp the complex relationships between global technological imaginaries-in this case of AI and artificial life-and the material and embodied workings of imagination in play.

After the British marketing of Detroit’s take on electronic dance music in 1988, with the compilation Techno! The New Sound of Detroit, techno music has been interwoven with a particular representation of this North American city. Resonating internationally with other electronic dance music scenes, a unique mythology of Detroit techno draws new audiences to what was the capital of the Fordist automobile industry. Opening the discussion with Movement, the electronic festival central to Detroit’s annual Techno Week, we argue that Detroit and its citizens activate techno music to promote the renaissance of this once powerful industrial metropolis. Techno, and its associated cultural capital, act as value producers in the context of macro-economic urban regeneration processes within the local history and African-American futurist music aesthetics. From Detroit in the current era we trace back key issues, such as the mythology of Detroit as the “Techno City” and its DJ-producers, contrasting politics in Detroit’s techno scenes, and the appropriation of abandoned industrial spaces. Finally, the chapter addresses a dialogue of emerging techno music producers with the aesthetics of house music in Midwestern American industrial metropolis, Chicago. It is argued that techno dance music has articulated the technoculture since the late 1980s: in other words, it signifies lived experience of culture dominated by information and communication technologies in a city that had partly morphed into a post-industrial ruin.

Editor: Simon Emmerson (Ed) 
Publisher: Routledge
This chapter addresses a transnational network of relationships within electronic dance music in the context of the machine aesthetic of techno. It is shown that a sense of a global music scene is nevertheless possible. Beyond historically shaped post-colonial and socio-economic links that underpin a range of global popular cultural forms, the techno aesthetic arguably responds to, and inoculates against, a sense of post-human alienation and a dominance of electronic communication and information technologies of the technoculture. Accompanied by a form of futurism, techno scenes embrace the radical potential of information technologies in a seemingly deterritorialised manner, producing locally specific responses to the global technoculture that can differ in aesthetics and identity politics. In this sense, the electronic dance music floor embodies a plurality of competing “technocracies”.

Öz: Japonya'nın II. Dünya Savaşı'nın sonunda yaşadığı önemli travma ve sonrasındaki hızlı modernleşme süreci eleştirel anlamda anime sinemasında yerini almaktadır. Bu çalışmada Japon anime sineması, fantezi ve bilim kurgu türleri üzerinden incelenecektir. Söz konusu animelerinin türün batılı örneklerine göre farklılığı; in-san, kültür ve doğa ilişkisine doğulu bir bakışa sahip olmalarıdır. Fantezi ve bilim kurgu anime filmleri; yaratılan ilginç karakterler ve mekanlar aracılığıyla bilim, teknoloji ve inanç üzerine sorgulamalar içermektedir. Çalışmanın amacı anime filmlerde görülebilen modernite eleştirisini ve bu bağlamda ele alınan çevre, top-lumsal cinsiyet, gençlik, teknoloji, inanç, savaş, politik yozlaşma temalarını ortaya koymaktır.
Abstract: The important trauma at the end of the Second World War and rapid modernization process afterwards in Japan take place in anime cinema critically. In this study, Japan anime cinema will be examined through fantasy and science fiction genres. The difference of this anime films between western films of same genre is they have the oriental view on human, culture and nature relation. Fantasy and science fiction anime films have inquiries about science, technology and belief through interesting characters and settings created. Aim of the study is to put forth the modernity critism and the themes of environment, gender, youth, technology, belief, war, politic corruption in the context of the critism that exist in anime films.

Gene editing, stem cell therapy, and other forms human bio-engineering have accelerated dramatically over the last decade, and are now on the cusp of fundamentally altering the biological and evolutionary trajectories of human bodies. In particular, CRISPR, a gene editing tool, has paved the way for unprecedented precision in genetic manipulation, opening up our DNA—in vitro, at this point—to any biologist with a lab and significant funding.

But radical advancements in biotechnology did not emerge out of nothing. They are the pinnacle, surely, of a long history of conceptual development and human tinkering in the life sciences—Robert Hooke’s discovery of cells in the 17th century, the standardization of surgical techniques in the 20th—but they also connect in various ways to discourses and narratives that imagine human bodies as plastic and permeable zones of alteration.

The aim of this presentation is to survey some of these narratives, particularly as they developed in feminist science fiction from the 1970s onward—a loose collection of texts so thematically and politically diverse as to render the term “subgenre” inapplicable. From James Tiptree, Jr. and Octavia E. Butler to Sheri S. Tepper and Ann Leckie, bodies in these works are fleshy, material things open to experimentation and transformation. They are porous, variable, open-ended—the opposite of the “hard” bodies of traditional military sf, where masculinity is a shrine that resists penetration.

By discussing the reshaping of bodies in both science and science fiction, this talk aims to understand some of the discursive loops that connect the two.

Una entrevista con el escritor mexicano Naief Yehya en la cual se abarca su llegada a los Estados Unidos, su experiencia y sus reflexiones sobre este campo literario y los desafíos para los escritores en español en este. Esta entrevista también engloba una variedad de temas como la influencia transformativa de las culturas minoritarias en los EE.UU., la relación esquizofrénica de muchos escritores latinoamericanos de su generación con el gigante cultural del norte, sus reflexiones sobre el papel del autor en un sentido colectivo y personal, y sus actuales proyectos narrativos y de no ficción.

Through a focus on the electronic machine aesthetic of genre variants of techno music, this chapter addresses affective relationships between dancing to repetitive beats associated with electronic dance music culture, and a technoculture that is based on the accelerated data flows of electronic information and communication technologies.

En esta investigación se desarrolló una aproximación al estudio de los
videojuegos de comunicación de la ciencia, utilizando como marco de análisis la coherencia y cohesión entre los distintos elementos del juego y su propósito: comunicar evolución por
selección natural.

It is impossible to ignore the fact that our technologies and our cultures are inextricably linked, at least in the industrialized West. Advanced technologies enable the extension of lifespans, the simulation of realities, the mapping of genetic codes, and the creation of art. They facilitate instantaneous communications across the globe, collapsing, as David Harvey has claimed, the traditional distances of space and time. Our cultures have always been connected to our tools, but the relationship has never been more intimate.

This course aims to survey a range of literary and cinematic narratives that explore the growth, acceleration, and consequences of modern technoculture. Works of literature—science fiction, speculative fiction, imaginative literature, and so forth—will be placed alongside films—short and feature, mainstream and fringe—and embedded historically within debates and developments such as bio-engineering, cyborgs, future cities, gender, high-tech war, race, the singularity, and more. By studying texts as discourses rooted in a complex and shifting technocultural landscape, students will discuss some of the ways these narratives shape—and are shaped by—our technological realities.

The paper discusses Kafka’s obsessive themes (exile, strangeness, abandonment, people-functions) that reflect through his novel Amerika. The motif of journey for the purpose of the quest is presented as the key one, but in its perverted form. Kafka’s anti-hero is experiencing failure at every step, and his journey is a futile, his quest useless. What America symbolized at the time – the Promised Land, New World, American Dream, in Kafka’s vision is inverted into its own opposite. The paper also insists on the prophetic character of Kafka’s prose, Amerika thus announces the techno-culture society that today dominates the world.
Keywords
F. Kafka, America, stranger, grotesque, exile, American Dream
У раду се расправља о Кафкиним опсесивним темама (изгнанство, странствовање, одбаченост, људи-функције) пропуштеним кроз призму романа Америка. Мотив путовања у циљу потраге и овде је дат као кључни али у свом первертованом виду. Кафкин антијунак на сваком кораку доживљава неуспех, његово путовање је узалудно, а трагање обесмишљено. Оно што је Америка тада симболизовала – обећано место, нови свет, амерички сан, код Кафке се изокреће у сопствену супротност. Такође, инсистира се на профетском карактеру Кафкине прозе, Америка тако најављује друштво технокултуре којe данас увелико доминира светом.
Кључне речи: Ф. Кафка, Америка, странац, гротеска, изгнанство, амерички сан