Tao Lin’s recent novel Taipei (2013) is a fictional document of life in our current digital culture. The protagonist, Paul — who is loosely based on the author — is numb from his always turned on digitally mediated life, and throughout the novel increases his recreational…
View More Digital Metaphors: Editor’s Introduction
John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale…
View More An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth
‘I can feel it’. HAL 9000, the supercomputer at the centre of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), makes this claim to emotional sensitivity moments before its higher functions are terminated by astronaut Dave Bowman, the sole surviving human aboard…
View More The Electronic Heart
In his essay ‘Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust’ Joseph Litvak discusses a tendency among marginalised youths, and especially among queer ones, to seek solace in the idea of ‘some other place, some other world, magically different from the world of family and school’ (76)…
View More The Metaphorics of Virtual Depth