How can we interpret cyberspace? What is the place of the embodied human agent in the virtual world?
This innovative collection examines the emerging arena of cyberspace and the challenges it presents for the social and cultural forms of the human body. It shows how changing relations between body and technology offer new arenas for cultural representations. At the same time, the contributors examine the realities of human embodiment and the limits of virtual worlds. Topics examined include: technological body modifications, replacements and prosthetics; bodies in cyberspace, virtual environments and cyborg culture; cultural representations of technological embodiment in visual and literary productions; and cyberpunk science fiction as a pre-figurative social and cultural theory.
Зміст
Cultures of Technological Embodiment – Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows
An Introduction
Feedback and Cybernetics – David Tomas
Reimaging the Body in the Age of Cybernetics
The Future Looms – Sadie Plant
Weaving Women and Cybernetics
The Design of Virtual Reality – Michael Heim
Postmodern Virtualities – Mark Poster
The Embodied Computer/User – Deborah Lupton
Rear-View Mirrorshades – Nigel Clark
The Recursive Generation of the Cyberbody
Cyberspace and the World We Live in – Kevin Robbins
Descartes Goes to Hollywood – Samantha Holland
Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema
Prosthetic Memory – Alison Landsberg
Total Recall and Blade Runner
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) – Nick Land
Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of This Century Alive – Vivian Sobchack
Forms of Technological Embodiment – Anne Balsamo
Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture
Cyber(body)parts – Robert Rawdon Wilson
Prosthetic Consciousness
Corpses, Animals, Machines and Mannequins – Kevin Mc Carron
The Body and Cyberpunk