[ecrea] Call for Papers - Crank up the Resolution: Cyberpunk in Visual/Virtual Media

Call for Contributions
Crank up the Resolution: Cyberpunk in Visual/Virtual Media

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead
channel.”
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Contributions are invited for a critical anthology focusing on cyberpunk
beyond its literary dimension, its presentation in visual/virtual media,
and its ongoing relevance in the 21st century.

Cyberpunk, that immensely popular form of 1980s science fiction (SF),
was shaped by the innovative and highly stylized literary works
of writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy
Rucker, John Shirley, and Lewis Shiner, to name a few. Gibson’s debut
novel Neuromancer is the ur-text of cyberpunk, and as the opening line
quoted above reveals, it is a genre that relied strongly on visual
motifs for its brushed-chrome literary splendor. The cyberpunk imaginary
is richly saturated with computer-generated worlds, video games, music
videos, simulated stimuli, consensual hallucinations, and many other
technologies that highlight the visual and/or the virtual. As a result,
the importance of the visual/virtual component readily translated
cyberpunk into contemporaneous film, television, and video games, such
as Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), Videodrome (1983), Max
Headroom (1985; 1987), Wasteland (1987), Akira (1988), and so forth.

It is in no small part due to this visual/virtual form that cyberpunk
survived many pronouncements of its demise over the years and decades
that followed its initial popularity. Cyberpunk has evolved beyond
the original cadre of eighties-era authors and undergone transformations
in successive waves with increasingly varied thematic and political
interests and goals; in other words, as Thomas Foster remarks in The
Souls of Cyberfolk, cyberpunk “didn’t so much die as experience a sea
change into a more generalized cultural formation.”

Visual and virtual embodiments of cyberpunk have continued to resonate
well into the new millennium, in media as varied as film, television,
video games, comic books/graphic novels, and art (photography,
painting, design, fashion, etc.); yet, monographs and anthologies tend
to focus overwhelmingly on literary cyberpunk with little attention paid
to its visual/virtual offspring. Crank up the Resolution: Cyberpunk in
Visual/Virtual Media seeks to redress this oversight by focusing on the
‘sea changes’ of cyberpunk in visual/virtual media, including (but not
limited to) the following:

·       Cyberpunk in Film and Television

·     Aeon Flux
·     Akira
·     Almost Human
·     Avalon
·     Blade Runner
·     Dollhouse
·     Elysium
·     Gamer
·     Ghost in the Shell
·     Hackers
·     Hardwired
·     Johnny Mnemonic
·     Lawnmower Man
·     RoboCop
·     Sleep Dealer
·     Strange Days
·     TekWar
·     Terminator
·     The Matrix
·     Total Recall
·     Tron
·     Ultraviolet
·     Videodrome
·     Virtuosity

·       Cyberpunk in Video Games

·     Beneath a Steel Sky
·     Cyberpunk 2077
·     Cypher
·     Deus Ex
·     Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
·     Fear Effect
·     Metal Gear Solid
·     Neocron
·     Remember Me
·     Shadowrun
·     Shin Megami Tensei
·     Syndicate
·     System Shock
·     Wasteland

·     Watch Dogs

·       Cyberpunk in Comic Books/Graphic Novels

·     Transmetropolitan
·     The Resistance
·     Hard Boiled
·     Heavy Liquid
·     Singularity 7
·     Channel Zero
·     Hard Drive
·     Ballistic
·     Doktor Sleepless
·     The Surrogates


·       Cyberpunk in art/photography/design/fashion/advertisement
·       The visual/virtual in Cyberpunk-derived genres
·       Theoretical approaches to visual/virtual cyberpunk
·       Aesthetics of visual/virtual cyberpunk

Crank up the Resolution: Cyberpunk in Visual/Virtual Media seeks to
highlight visual and virtual forms of cyberpunk with outstanding
academic scholarship and new critical approaches in an anthology that
can be readily accessible to academics, scholars, teachers, and students
alike. 1-2 page abstracts (Word or RTF) and brief biographies are
invited by August 1st, 2015.

The projected timeline for the anthology is: Abstracts due by August
1st , 2015; participants notified by Sep 1st 2015; finished papers due
Jan 1st , 2016; revisions in spring 2016; publication in fall 2016
(pending publisher timelines).

Submissions and queries can be sent to the editors Graham J. Murphy
(Seneca College, Toronto, Canada) and Lars Schmeink (Hans
Bredow Institute for Media Research, Hamburg, Germany) via email.
Regular mail addresses will be provided upon request.

Graham J. Murphy: (gjamurphy /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(gjamurphy /at/ gmail.com)>
Lars Schmeink: (lars /at/ wortraub.com) <mailto:(lars /at/ wortraub.com)>
------------------

Wortraub
Freiberuflicher Journalist
und Medienwissenschaftler
Dr. Lars Schmeink
Kantstraße 34
22089 Hamburg

Email: (lars /at/ wortraub.com) <mailto:(lars /at/ wortraub.com)>



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