ABSTRACT
Artificial Culture is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, especially science fiction films and novels. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationship between people, our bodies, and technology at large. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which we as a culture can measure what it means to be human. Science fiction feature films and novels, and other related media, frequently and provocatively deploy ideas of the artificial in ways which the lines between people, our bodies, spaces and culture more broadly blur and, at times, dissolve.
Building on the rich foundational work on the figures of the cyborg and posthuman, this book situates the artificial in similar terms, but from a nevertheless distinctly different viewpoint. After examining ideas of the artificial as deployed in film, novels and other digital contexts, this study concludes that we are now part of an artificial culture entailing a matrix which, rather than separating minds and bodies, or humanity and the digital, reinforces the symbiotic connection between identities, bodies, and technologies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |17 pages
An Artificial Introduction
part I|29 pages
Artificial Intelligence
chapter 1|14 pages
Early Artificial Intelligence Films
part II|32 pages
Artificial Life
chapter 3|13 pages
From Digital Genesis to the Artificial Other
part III|37 pages
Artificial Space
chapter 5|13 pages
The Fortification of Place in the Digital Age
chapter 6|12 pages
Resistance is Spatial
chapter 7|10 pages
The Infinite Plasticity of the Digital?
part IV|42 pages
Artificial People
chapter 8|25 pages
Matrices of Embodiment
chapter 9|15 pages
The Symbiosis of Special Effects
part V|25 pages
Artificial Culture