Welcome to Volume 7 (2017) of Technoculture! We’re pleased to bring out this issue, even if it’s a bit late in coming. This issue includes work by both new and accomplished scholars and artists as we continue to publish works that help us understand the way technology works in the various cultures we examine, and push our understanding of the way technology affects both critical and creative responses to the problems and opportunities that are created by these new possibilities.
Our three critical essays offer rich perspectives on the ways in which technology changes the ways in which we are fully human. In alphabetical order, Bradly Knox’ essay analyzes the ways in which the availablility of drones has shifted from military uses to uses that extend the abilities of the human consumer to see higher; he reads this new use of consumer technology as an example of way in the transhuman affects us all.
Paula Murphy’s work takes the opposite tack. Her article explore the ways in which Samantha (an artifiical intelligence) is striving to become more fully human–a fairly standard trope in both monster movies and science fiction–in Spike Jonze’s Her. As Murphy notes in her abstract for the piece, “. . . the film presents an artificially intelligent operating system that ultimately moves beyond matter, [and . . . ] provides a case study for the importance of matter and the consequences of de-materialization.”
And finally, Matthew A. Vetter and Keon Mandell Pettiway use their essay to point out the ways in which “a queer feminist media praxis [. . . ] allows for the enactment of a mode of praxis that engages in both critical analysis and speculative re-imagining of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, especially in terms of its cultural, sexual, and gender politics. . .”
Our four critical works include another work from joshua michael carro, documentation of his [sonic portraits of time], Kyle D. Stedman’s audio essay “Listening Like a Fan,” and two pieces by Hugo Paquete: an interview with Roy Ascott and documentation of Paquete’s Zoe: Actuant. Each of these digital works are part of Technoculture‘s commitment to presenting both creative and critical works.
Finally, the issue concludes with five reviews, all from graduate students, who will no doubt produce interesting and needed work of their own in the near future.
Enjoy!
© 2017 Keith Dorwick, used by permission
