Abstracts Computer Science

Vision and Speed: Contemporary Cyberpunk Literature and Cyberculture

by Hui-Chun Li

Cyberpunk literature constructs both a utopian society based on advanced technology and a dystopian society ruled by totalitarian, technocratic, militarist and late capitalist regimes; it thus envisions a better future as it, at the same time, unveils postmodern conditions and anxieties. If literatureâs ultimate task is to communicate feelings, ideas, and states of mind, speed as one of contemporary cybercultureâs major symptoms inhibits such communication. Depictions of privileging ocular perceptions as repetitively represented in cyberpunk narratives are reflective of such reduction of scope of human experiences. This dissertation delves into the notions of speed and vision as demonstrated by cybercultural practices and contemporary cyberpunk literature writers William Gibson and Vernor Vinge. Dealing with cybercultural issuesâsuch as accelerated cyberculture, spectacular mediatization, fantasy, symptoms of malaise in cybernauts, transcendence and boredom, mass surveillance, the shaping of synapses, and analogico-digital practicesâcyberpunk fiction constantly incorporates diversified perspectives to extend its understanding of the contemporary world. Going against the grain of seeing cyberculture as a potentially risky practice to the shaping of humanity and history, as is demonstrated in Guy Debordâs and Paul Virilioâs concepts of technological and digital dystopia and of a society turning into ideological spectacles, Bernard Stiegler envisions that a new paradigm of perception and of knowledge will emerge from analogico-digital practices. I approach the works of the contemporary cyberpunk writers with Gibsonâs idea of the phantasmagoric aspect of cyberculture and examine how cyberpunk writers inform and represent a society that is mediated by images and in which lived time is colonized by real time. I decode the creative analogico-digital practices consistently manifested and portrayed in cyberculture and cyberpunk narratives and explore how these practices can be related to the issues of speed, vision, fantasy, media, metaphysics, and memory. In doing so I make evident that these cultural practices as forms of resistance gradually are turned into a politically contested site in which lived lives are erased by real time and culture is commodified, while they also provide us with new formations of knowledge. The alternative knowledge is a seed to reverse engineer an industrialized programming, which is a means to making the poison of machine vision and speed into the cure of humanity. Advisors/Committee Members: Nai-nu Yang (chair), Rudolphus Teeuwen (committee member), Che-Ming Yang (chair), TEE Kim Tong (chair), Min-hsiou Hung (chair).