Waves

Kippleization

These past years have seen a revival of sorts of cyberpunk, that early-80s buzzword once excitingly epitomised by such concrete-and-neon spectacles as Blade Runner and The Terminator and the literary musings of William Gibson.

The Matrix notwithstanding, the West generally regards cyberpunk as a strictly 1980s phenomenon. With Shinya Tsukamoto’s return to his epoch-making saga with Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, Mamoru Oshii’s ongoing exploration of humanity’s outer reaches in both live and animated form, the biomechanical goriness unleashed by some of the talents currently united under the Sushi Typhoon banner, and a neverending deluge of sci-fi anime, it is safe to say that in Japan the genre never went away.

This is the immediate realisation at which one arrives when flicking through Steven T. Brown’s Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture, a long-overdue study of a genre that, as human interaction becomes progressively virtual and the virtual becomes progressively mundane, also seems to become increasingly relevant.

Brown cites a passage from David Cronenberg’s DVD audio commentary to one of cyberpunk’s Ur-texts, Videodrome, to not only illustrate how effortlessly cybernetic our lives have become but also to define the concept of “the limits of the human“ that underscores the author’s approach to the subject in this book: “Technology isn’t really effective, it doesn’t really expose its true meaning, I feel, until it has been incorporated into the human body. And most of it does, in some way or another. Electronics. People wear glasses. They wear hearing aides that are really little computers. They wear pacemakers. They have their intestines modified. It’s really quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to the human body and really take it some place that evolution on its own could not take it. Technology has really taken over evolution. We’ve seized control of evolution ourselves without really quite being conscious of it. It’s no longer the environment that affects change in the human body, it’s our minds, it’s our concepts, our technology that are doing that.“

Diving

Peace Fish (by Shintaro Kago)

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