reviews

William Gibson novel The Peripheral

The following contains light spoilers for William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral.

I just finished The Peripheral, William Gibson’s latest novel, published in 2014. Generally, the work documents two different futures: a time not too far off from now (maybe 15 years or so?) and then around 70 years after that. Overall, it’s extremely Gibsonian in its plot and narrative arc (my wife asked, “what’s that about?” as I started it and I could only reply, “I’ll tell you after page 50”), and for that I really loved it. His visions of the future are informed by so much more than the utopian technolust or dystopian apocalypse of Hollywood or most pop speculative fiction. Instead, they are filled with nuanced socio-political prescience, the kind that just seems to make sense as logical progressions from our current trajectory.

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In addition to contributing to Cyborgology, I write a sex column for the Pittsburgh City Paper. This week, I wrote a piece that’s relevant to conversations here, titled, “A new Kickstarter campaign has a terrible solution to your relationship problems.

I look at LoveSync, a new technology aimed at helping couples with mismatched libidos, and argue it’s an example of how technological solutions to social or interpersonal problems can do more harm than good.

Jessie Sage on Twitter @sapiotextual.

Warning: Mr. Robot spoilers abound (but, come on, what are you doing still not caught up with this show?). 

In my first post for Cyborgology last year, I suggested that perhaps Elliot Alderson, the paranoid and delusional protagonist of USA Network’s Mr. Robot, was the epitome of a Deleuzian Body Without Organs—an extreme state wherein rhythms and intensities not available in the anatomical body provide access to a plane of immanence (though I also incorrectly suggested that Elliot is schizophrenic). I used his own self-tracking technique—a journal—and how this journal led to advantage being taken of him. If you’ve read my other posts here, you won’t be surprised to hear that I then used all of that as a critique of the quantified self. What can I say? When all you read is QS critique, everything you read is QS critique. After making my way through season 3, however, I’d like to revisit Elliot and what other sorts of theoretical signposts I might use to understand his character. more...

METATOPIA 4.0 – Algoricene (2017) by Jaime Del Val

The 23rd International Symposium on Electronic Art was held in collaboration with the 16th Festival Internacional De La Imagen in Manizales, Colombia in mid-June 2017. The opening ceremony for the conference kicked off with a performance by the artist Jaime Del Val, entitled METATOPIA 4.0 – Algoricene (2017), described by the artist as “a nomadic, interactive and performative environment for outdoors and indoors spaces.” The artist statement goes on (and on) to explain that the piece “merges dynamic physical and digital architectures” in an effort to “def[y] prediction and control in the Big Data Era.” In actuality, Del Val stripped down to his naked body, put himself in a clear mesh tent, projected abstract shapes onto the tent, and danced to what might best be called abstract electronica (think dubstep’s “wubwubwub” without the pop).

What piece of what Del Val presented qualifies as “electronic art”? Was it the music? The projector? The use of the term “Big Data Era”, capitalized (in lieu, perhaps, of scare-quotes) in his entirely glib artist statement? I was similarly confused by Alejandro Brianza’s artist talk, “Underground Soundscapes”, in which he showed a few photos of subway systems around the world, accompanied by sound recordings from each visit. About Brianza’s work and Del Val’s, I wondered: why is this electronic art? In fact, throughout the duration of my visit to the ISEA conference and festival, I found myself asking “why” quite often.

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Back in January, I wrote about Deborah Lupton’s The Quantified Self, a recent publication from Polity by the University of Canberra professor in Communication. In that post I mentioned that I planned to read another book on the QS movement from MIT Press, Self-Tracking by Gina Neff, a Communication scholar out of University of Washington, and Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist at Intel. And so I have. more...

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Until very recently, the majority of texts on the quantified self have been either short-form essays or uncritical manifestos penned by the same neoliberal technocrats whose biohacking dreams we have to thank for self-tracking’s proliferation over the past decade. Last year saw the publication of two books that take a more critical look at QS: Self-Tracking (MIT Press) by a pair of American researchers, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus, and The Quantified Self (Polity) by Deborah Lupton, a professor in Communications at the University of Canberra in Australia. While I haven’t read Neff and Nafus’s work yet (but plan to do so in the coming months), I did just finish Lupton’s book and think it’s a great place to start for anyone beginning to research the quantified self and its associated movement. The book is also available in the PDF format, but if you prefer to print the book or look into the images in the ebook, they are not pretty much clear as they are in pdf format. If you are looking for fine quality images, then we prefer you the conversion of pdf to jpg for better quality. more...

 

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Warning: Major spoilers for Mr. Robot (through s02e06) follow.

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I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. In all honesty I probably will not watch it until I can assure that I will see a high definition version for free through whatever means comes to my disposal. What I have seen, the cross-promotions, the essays, and the toys, tells me everything I need to know to assess it as a piece of culture. Star Wars is not a movie, it is a platform for media and a financial vehicle. Star Wars has plot like America has elections. It’s almost a formality, the official pomp heralding in a new wave of characters, theories, and controversies. If we black box the film itself and instead look at all of the culture that spews out from its unknown (to me) depths, I think we get a much more cohesive (I’d even go so far as to say honest) assessment of the entire event. more...

Source: Marvel.com

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Marvel’s Jessica Jones is a dark and reluctant hero. An alcoholic private detective, Jones’ super-human physical strength remains largely underutilized when we meet her in the Netflix series  opening episode. As the story unfolds, we learn that Jessica self-medicates to deal with a traumatic past in which a man named Kilgrave, who controls people with the use of his voice, held Jessica captive as his lover while forcing her to engage in violence and even murder. Their relationship ended when Jessica was finally able to resist his control—a quality unique to her—and Kilgrave was hit by a bus, leaving him presumably dead. The storyline of the first season is premised on Jessica learning that Kilgrave is still alive, has captured another victim, and is coming to reclaim Jessica. In turn, Jones hunts for Kilgrave to ensure that he dies, once and for all.

About halfway through the season Jessica realizes that Kilgrave is tracking her whereabouts by controlling her friend and neighbor Malcom Ducasse. To wrest Malcom from Kilgrave’s control, Jessica strikes a deal. She agrees to send Kilgrave a selfie at precisely 10am each day. At his direction, Jones even includes a smile.  more...

Chick Palahniuk's Beautiful You
Chick Palahniuk’s Beautiful You

Penny Harrigan is perfectly average and she’s never had an orgasm. She is the leading lady in Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book Beautiful You, in which C. Linus Maxwell, CEO of MicroDataCom releases a line of sex toys so potent that women literally recede from society, preferring to stay home to masturbate incessantly. Remember the 1998 episode of “Sex and the City” in which Charlotte became addicted to her rabbit vibrator? It’s like that, but global. The book is a quirky cross between a motivational anecdote about a woman’s journey to sexual empowerment, and a grim critique of dystopian industrialized society, just with painful details and boring writing.

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