Gothic High Tech

THE FUTURE IS A KIND OF HISTORY THAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET He's the legendary Cyberpunk Guru. He roams our postmodern planet, from the polychrome tinsel of Los Angeles to the chicken-fried cyberculture of Austin... From the heretical Communist slums of gritty Belgrade to the Gothic industrial castles of artsy Torino... always whipping that slider-bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable. He's a Californian design visionary. He's an European electronic-art curator. He's a Swiss professor of media philosophy. He's a Prophet of Augmented Reality, even. He's an author, journalist, editor, critic, theorist, futurist, and blogger. Obviously he's pretty much anything that he can get his hands on. And he never stops typing. This sixth collection of his fantastic stories is a comic arsenal of dark euphoria. It's even weirder, harsher and more twisted than the scary decade that inspired it. Boy, that's saying something. If there's one thing dear to the heart of this exotic character, one vital prize he will never, ever surrender, one stony core to his mutable, globalized being, it's his fanatical allegiance to the radical potential of science fiction. That is the truth. Really. That is one hundred percent accurate. You could look that up on Wikipedia. Just like some far-fetched, globe-trotting antihero from one of his own unsettling, yet darkly prophetic novels, he is... Actually, never mind who he is. Does that matter? Is that an issue for us, really? You know what? We're all done here. Turn the page. We need to pretty much move right along.

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.

This Companion offers a thorough overview of the diversity of the American Gothic tradition from its origins to the present.

A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

An account of prefabricated architecture around the world, from McDonalds drive-through restaurants to Ikea's flat-pack house.

The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ubiquity across genres and popular media. The volume is divided into four main thematic sections, spanning representations related to ethnic minorities, bodily monstrosity, environmental anxieties, and haunted technology. The chapters explore both overtly gothic texts and pop culture artifacts that, despite not being widely considered strictly so, rely on gothic strategies and narrative devices.

High Tech - sometimes known as Structural Expression - is a style of Modern architecture that produced some of the most prominent and visually exciting buildings of the twentieth century. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong, the Lloyd's of London headquarters in London, UK, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Extensively illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and accessibly written, High Tech Architecture - A style reconsidered discusses the intended meanings of the visual vocabulary involved in High Tech, and places the style in the broad context of other Modern architecture of the twentieth century. The book offers a balanced re-appraisal of the extravagant claims that have been made for High Tech, by its progenitors and architectural critics, as an architecture appropriate for the built environment of the future.

This volume, a collection with contributions from some of the major scholars of the Gothic in literature and culture, reflects on how recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. The engaging essays look into the links between technologies and the proliferation of the Gothic seen in an excess of Gothic texts and tropes: Frankensteinesque experiments, the manufacture of synthetic (true?) blood, Moreauesque hybrids, the power of the Borg, Dr Jekyll’s chemical experimentations, the machinery of Steampunk, or the corporeal modifications of Edward Scissorhands. Further, they explore how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: Gothic in social media, digital technologies, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth/ic communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema. Contributors address how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice, asking significant questions: How has the technology of the Gothic contributed to the writing of self and other? How have Gothic technologies been gendered, sexualized, encrypted, coded or de-coded? How has the Gothic manifested itself in new technologies across diverse geographical locations? This volume explores how Gothic technologies textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational, and global contexts. It will be of interest to scholars of the literary Gothic, extending beyond to include fascinating interventions into the areas of cultural studies, popular culture, science fiction, film, and TV.