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untitled book review of Sounds Between Trees, Peter Larkin (Guillemot Press)
Get PDFpoetry book revie
Why does jelly wobble?
Get PDFFind out how gelatin’s bonds, structure and properties make jelly jiggl
Speaking to the Future
Get PDFNuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it
Racing to the Rescue
Get PDFWhen Covid struck there was a critical shortage of NHS ventilators. As a new book explains, an F1 team swung into action to design and build a device in record time – and saved thousands of live
Lawrence Berkeley National Laobratory: American Physics Society Historic Site Dedication Ceremony for the Bevatron
No full textBevatron Particle Accelerator Honored as Historic Site by Physics Society. Kit Chapman was keynote speaker
Picturing Ghosts: Memories, Traces and Prophesies of Rebellion in Postdictatorship Chilean Film
Get PDFHow can the afterlives of anticapitalist and antidictatorship resistance enliven contemporary imaginaries of social justice? Where can the legacies of authoritarianism be spatially located and challenged? And what roles can film play in reckoning with these spectral inheritances? Picturing Ghosts addresses these questions in relation to postdictatorship Chile, a country that has become a nodal point in global geopolitical narratives about the obsolescence of socialism, the birth of neoliberalism and «the end of history». Exploring how the Chilean "transition to democracy" has been narrated in film, the book focuses on stories of haunting and rebellion that unsettle hegemonic temporalities and frameworks of memory. Engaging with the idea of haunting as a trope, a conceptual metaphor and a structure of feeling, it considers different approaches to reckoning with the present past as an emancipatory presence – a multiplicity of unfinished projects and unanswered questions that the cultural imaginary of late capitalism hastens to smooth over.
Through a cartographic approach to analysis, this study looks beyond established landscapes of memorialisation in Chile, encountering rebellious subjects and stories in houses and haciendas, poblaciones, the presidential palace, the Atacama Desert, shopping malls, public schools and university campuses. In doing so, it contributes to an emerging field of research that problematises the dominant spatial and temporal imaginaries of «post-conflict» transitions, striving to construct more inclusive and transformative conceptions of truth, justice and emancipation
Marshall, Kingsley. 2022. ‘Mere Data Makes A Man: Artificial Intelligence in Bladerunner 2049’, in English, Jeri and Pascal, Marie. 2022. Refocus: The Films of Denis Villeneuve. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN: 9781474497381
Get PDFBlade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) uses the manner with which near-future technology recreates or feigns consciousness in order to present a wider discourse around notions of identity, memory, and the formulation of the human self and subjectivity. The franchise, including predecessor Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and three short film prequels – Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (Wantabe, 2017), 2036: Nexus Dawn (Luke Scott, 2017), and 2048: Nowhere to Run (Luke Scott, 2017) – explores the impact of technological change on society, and the ethics and philosophical concerns pertaining to the use of such technologies.
The world of Blade Runner is orientated around three main themes; (1) the development, use, and exploitation of technology, (2) the ethics related to the deployment of this technology by members of the public and corporations, and (3) an exploration of the nature of what constitutes consciousness specifically related to artificial intelligence and bioengineered technology. In Blade Runner 2049, these themes manifest themselves through two key characters. K is a ‘replicant’ slave whose memories are entirely artificial though who experiences life in the world through a bioengineered body and Joi, K’s holographic companion initially restricted to K’s home through the limits of its projection system, and born of an artificial intelligence that evolves over time.
Mireille Hildebrandt observes, though both automation and autonomic machine learning processes rely on algorithms, the distinction is that automation is static, while autonomic machine learning is ‘adaptive, dynamic and more or less transformative” (2016: 57). As such both K and Joi can be determined as autonomic – or self-governing systems – where their respective bioengineered or machine learning systems allows them the space to develop – and in some readings of the film, fully form - their own human-like emotions. Each satisfies Martin Heidegger’s notion of an “an openness-of-being” in that both entities are present and able to directly relate to the world around them (1977).
Andrew Schopp notes that proponents of transhumanism such as Raymond Kurzweil (1999, 2012) commonly represent new technologies as a catalyst for such changes as a positive outcome or ideal (2019). Each iteration of Bladerunner aligns with other transmedia representations of AI - challenges this notion, presenting the ethical and socio-political challenges of technological change through the prism of current experience throwing light on how and where such change presents a challenge to the human experience (2019: 66).
This paper considers how the film presents representations of machine learning or AI as a biocapitalist discourse that presents the philosophical and ethical impacts of real-world applications of technology
from When We Were There (2)
Get PDFWhen We Were There is a collaborative sequence of short prose-poem haibun whose subject is ostensibly the 40 cities of their titles. Unlike most gazetteers, however, they are not about the architecture, geography or history of a place but are personal responses which implicitly consider how we relate to and interpret the places we visit, remember, travel through or around.
The Quint: an interdisciplinary quarterly from the north will publish a selection of work from our collaborative gazettee
In the Spirit of Things
Get PDFA CD review of Revenge of the She Punks, compiled by Vivien Goldman (2CD, Tapette Records
