Cyberpunk

Some of the Best Cyberpunk Lives in the World of Short Films — While Black Mirror might have made the idea of short and bleak sci-fi popular, the show is not the first to have come up with the idea of cyberpunk short stories. Whether you’ve just finished the show or never really liked it in the first place, I’ve got good news for you. There’s a lot more out there. 

We propose a cyberpunk reading of Christopher Nolan’s filmography. While stopping short of defining Nolan’s catalogue as cyberpunk per se, this author is interested in exploring what a cyberpunk interpretation of these films might reveal, or what value these films might hold for the cyberpunk enthusiast looking to reframe popular culture.

In Neon Leviathan, twelve cyberpunk short stories ricochet off one another. They center around marginalized perspectives in Australia after a futuristic war entangled that country, Vietnam, and China. The stratification of class has been exacerbated. Each story focuses on one or more individuals who are just trying to get by in a world where the corporations dominate. Expect tales of criminals, gamblers, medics, and soldiers.

Cyberpunk involves many elements we wouldn’t necessarily want to experience in real life. As audiences, we cheer when we see Neo in The Matrix wearing his trench coat and gunning down agents. As genre enthusiasts, we look skeptically at Star Trek and wonder if maybe the future will have a little more misery and oppression than that.

These image-processing wonders are called deepfakes, and they are the end result of a process that starts with Generative Adversarial Networks. That is, two machine-learning neural networks that have been trained against each other in an escalating arms race. One, the generator network, does nothing but produce images. The other, the discriminator network, is fed a mix of images produced by the generator along with real images.

Upgrade Blends Genres to Make it Ultimately Cyberpunk — When a mysterious benefactor offers to help him walk again by implanting an experimental technology called STEM, Grey gets the opportunity to regain a normal life. However, STEM ends up being a lot more than a piece of tech that enables of Grey’s body again. The tech is actually semi-autonomous evolving program.

These are the tools I carry for some rather specific tasks. The things you work on may require other tools, or more specialized versions of similar items. Remember, there’s no point in carrying around a bag of tools you don’t know how to use, so take some time to acquaint yourself with each one–especially those that can burn or cut you or the things around you.

Codeburst introduces a novel synthesis of media, but despite some great world-building descriptions and cool concepts like AI wirelessly “pushing” commands that limits someone’s free will, it still suffers from some weaknesses in the story department.  Nonetheless, the efforts of the artists should be applauded as an excellent example of “cool” incarnate. Codeburst is a perfect for a neon afternoon of reading, and it’s worth your time to pick up a copy today.

A few years ago, esteemed photographer Dan Tobin Smith opened a website calling for Kipple. He asked the public to send him everything forlorn, decomposed, without a purpose. Instead of an apartment floor, he covered his studio with such materials.

Vin Diesel’s Bloodshot was meant to be the first installment in a series of films set in a Valiant Comics shared cinematic universe. But after the pandemic put everyone’s plans on hold, it’s anybody’s guess whether this will actually be the first part of a series of films.