spacetime coordinates:2021, Beijing / Newark, New Jersey (society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerate effect called “nerve attenuation syndrome” or NAS. Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.)
Shot on location in Canada, with Toronto and Montreal filling in for the Newark and Beijing settings, a number of local sites, including Toronto’s Union Station and Montreal’s skyline and Jacques Cartier Bridge, are prominently featured.
Gibson said that the film was “taken away and re-cut by the American distributor”. He described the original film as “a very funny, very alternative piece of work”, and said it was “very unsuccessfully chopped and cut into something more mainstream”. Gibson compared this to editing Blue Velvet into a mainstream thriller lacking any irony. Prior to its release, critic Amy Harmon identified the film as an epochal moment when cyberpunk counterculture would enter the mainstream.
In 2022, a black-and-white edition of the film, titled Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White, was released. (wiki)
Although it shares a title with Cronenberg’s 1970 film of the same name, it is not a remake as the story and concept are unrelated. It marks Cronenberg’s return to the science fiction and horror genres for the first time since eXistenZ (1999). The film was an international co-production of Canadian, French, British and Greek companies. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: somewhere in near-future Germany
Transfer is a 2010 German science fiction/drama film directed by Damir Lukacevic.
I have seen this SF movie back when it came out. I somehow think it is still an important genre movie, and one woefully ignored I think. I did not see many reviews or many reactions to it. Maybe it is because it dealt quite early with some very difficult and sensitive areas: corpo-reality (Manuela Rossini), class, race, gender, refugees, rising inequality, poverty, and a rapidly aging population, things that are getting more traction outside of the immortalist/transhumanist frame etc
As in the best of SF – it is not just a riff on existing technologies, it takes actually existing tendencies and latent conflicts (even philosophical body mind issues), social tensions and pushes them further to their limits and beyond. Claire Colebrook has been one of the most incisive critique of the posthuman turn, or the new ultrahumanism of transhumanism and why the ‘Anthropocene’ starts from a rather parochial ‘anthropos’ where humanity is actually just standing for “an affluent, urban, Western lifestyle.” Kathryn Hayles has identified how key values of liberal-humanist ideology have survived the transhumanist transfer – and how such a technologically empowered ‘uber-humanism’, a kind of evil twin to ‘enlightened’ critical posthumanism. There is the blaring fact of power fantasies of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory that express an upgraded neo-Cartesian desire to transcend the body – the common trope of uploaded minds perhaps exemplified best in Transcendence (2017) movie. The durability of the technological forms of embodiment are always made at the expense of relegating “the vulnerable physical body […] [to the] allienum.”
I have seen Transfer quite a while ago, so it is not very fresh in my mind, but it struck a chord back then, and I don’t want risk forgetting or ignoring its role. The possibility to transfer a part of you – a mental of you that somehow gets neurally transferred into another (younger, more ‘alive’) body is a long been a staple of SF, in cyberpunk and in particular in biopunk’s more biotechnological or neuropolitical iterations of dystopia. Mind transfer was explored at large in the 2002 Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (as well as in the eponymous series loosely based on it), as well as the follow-ups to that – Broken Angels and Woken Furies who feature the same Takeshi Lev Kovacs, an ex-mercenary recruited to solve a series of crimes and abuses by the rich of the 26th century. Altered Carbon takes this transfer into new bodies called ‘sleeves’ using cortical stacks implanted in their vertebral column to record their consciousness. More importantly this sleeving or even storage of minds and experiences is not neutral, and the body is not just a residue, a supplement. This is turn makes possible that re-sleeving, using this prior backup is always quite complicated not just a one off clean process. There is also the possibility of torture at the level unforseen by mere one time one body identities. Once technologically stored, a future prisoner can be kept for an indefinite period, as well as tortured possibility in this digital virtual world. without bodily endurance limits.
The dream of upraded transfer is familiar to most transhumanist versions of Californian ideology type of Singularity, with the possibility of mind upload as one of the most salient or expected beneficial results of such a technological rapture. The way ‘mind uploads’ are presented and described by Singularitarians or their futuristic brethren is quite naive and almost a direct extension of their constant talk about extending a ‘faster’ capitalist neo-liberal (their business model obsession) into the future. Such post-Singularity and its VC proponents seems to promise a technological revolution, while at the same time being socially, economically and even philosophically quite drab and regressive. It literally is a badly thought out SF, a very un-reflexive and vengeful-nerd attitude to it, leaving everybody (who pissed you off) back and especially those cannot afford the transfer – being condemned to ’embodiment’ and ‘matter’. For Altered Carbon as well as for Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer the ability to jump bodies is not just a technological fix or a result in current advances of neuro- surgery, neural networks, cognitive sciences, but primarily a question of resources, or demand and offer and rigged economic systems. In Transfer African refugees Sarah and Apolain have their own agendas, and they stake their bodies and their minds as temporary storage – in the hope of making a better life for themselves or their children, or even just briefly escaping the horrors and violence of back home.
There is the constant reminder that these mind uploads and mind transfers do not come easy but at a price or a primium price, and that the technoscientific has fused completly with the corporate
What becomes more clear by the day is that a lot of former state life support system, such as health care and welfare (pension funds), even in the rare cases they did not get dismantled (as in the former East) or privatized by neoliberal shock therapy, have been heavily invested in some of the ecological, climatic and military disasters the world is full of. Maybe a generations ago, one would completely ignore such webs of interrelations and co-depedencies. In the UK for exemple, council worker pensions were heavily invested in military-industrial complex arm dealer and supplying the conflicts of this world. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was also partially involved in getting badly needed ‘hard currency’ by any means – sometimes joining the world market of art and arms deals. Even more biological products (one would say cybergothic or biopunk!) such as the blood supply of their own citizens where exchanged for hard cash from their Western enemies in the 1980s, during the last years of actually existing Socialism. Apparently blood trade was the most important source of revenue of unscheduled foreign currency for the health sector in East Germany.
Only recently, Norwegian government’s pension fund (the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund!) sold its last investments in fossil fuel companies. There is a non-metaphoric quite perverse and quite hard to follow financial trail between the investments in a profitable future of an ageing Western (or global North) population and fueling the instability of the Global South as well as the larger ecological depredations and diminution of their children’s or grandchildren’s future. The bad dystopian quality of such news – makes the Western technological civilization responsible for dealing in the most profitable things: fossil fuels and arms deals at the expense of all others. Extinction and future security be damned – lets just secure the shareholder investments! Such security of funds – is now directly and causally efficient in a larger insecurity and lack of resources of a future that is denied to a majority of others. Few SF movies have addressed this directly at the levels of bodies and Transfer is one of those few. Mind transfer are from the start very unequal, or as unequal as the financial flows of investments. Mind transfers follow lets say other flows of abstract, ‘immaterial’ resources that are backed by exploitation and environmental depredation. It is important to understand how such transfer are also about time, about calculated lived time and how this gets curtailed under current capitalist efficiency metrics and ability to quantify aspects that where previously out of the range of capital.
An availability of black African bodies or refugee bodies – makes them prey to biomedical interests or Big Pharma experimentation, even if for mostly benign of circumstances, let’s say with even the best of old, sick white clients. The white couple’s minds that temporarily inhabit these black bodies for 20 h out of 24 h are somehow lost in their own memories and nostalgia and somehow their mental lives preclude or have precedence over the minds (and affects) of their hosts. Their African hosts have just 4 h at their disposal to be themselves. This is a very literal example of LTV (labour theory of value), yet here the ncessary time is just the necessary time that you are you and have one’s own body at disposal. The body is staked and becomes borrowed by well to do owners of minds that can afford in their old age such transfers and are motivated enough by their personal histories, class and cultural background, ethics, attachments etc to even start considering inhabiting these ‘fresh others’. Life is not being sucked out vampirically from these available black bodies, yet they are diurnal vehicles of two Western minds, of a literalized ‘double consciousness’. Their own and their masters (employers) consciousness is located in the same body, quite close to what W. E. Burghardt Du Bois had in mind in his anticipative critique, even before such technologies where dreamt of. Also we are taking about some form of renewable energy – not the old lifeforce, but the lived experience of these people. Black bodies have also been an image of white ‘lust’, quite differently invested with libidinal energies. These is also made pulp – clear (somehow much to clear and spelled out) in the recent Lovecraft Country series where there is a back and forth shape-shifting (as well as gender shifting) from white women into white men and from black women bodies to white women bodies. We are not talking about the right-wing misgenation narratives of degeneracy and eugenics, but of black refugee bodies as the salvation of a Western aging world. Black bodies are presented iconically and in advertising as fit, sporty, wild, etc as a place of Western projection, white desires and fears. Black Marxism has been key in giving due importance to this transaltlanic trade, its vertebral centrality at the core of incipient Agricultural and Industrial Revolution. The Transatlantic Slave Trade – has been violently and forcefully already physically transferring bodies of already debased or abjected (non)humanity. Biopunk’s transference of minds or renewal of bodies has to always deal with this history that is so present in Afrofuturist SF. The transatlantic Trade was a first Atlantic transfer – that reduced and commodified these enslaved populations trough a brutal regime of free trade transfers and circulation by effectively transforming them into disposable things and mere disposable bodies (many have died being transported under horrific conditions and then thrown overboard). The massive tragedy of the refugee crisis, transiting under terrible, inhuman conditions Mediterranean also speaks about transfers and bodily displacement and annihilation. Only this year more than 1000 people have died trying to reach European shores and this is also a continuation and a reminder that high-tech technological “transfer” is only one side of the coin, that cannot detach other forms of bodily exploitation from their underlying historical factors.
This is also the pitfall of an easy – occupation, especially in a situation of inequality, where all purpose, all intentionally is somehow subsumed to the Western individualized, monadic and agential technosubject. Such total apathy and total occupation is always impossible. The total dream of perfect transfer is based on the fallacy that a person would reside just in one’s own dead, brain or be defined only as a narrow yet ruling consciousness. To restrict interior experience only to conscious experience is blaring mistake and one that has been repeatedly made in the history of Western philosophy from Descartes to Kant. The privileging of mind over matter has been slowly collapsing in the face of a “strange or weird sort of realism”(Levy Bryant) that admits the radical unkownability of things and way every entity, from human bodies to insect swarms to bacteria to comets exists regardless of whether one bothers to think about them or not. Consciousness is indeed something quite peculiar and special, but in no way essential (as in the ‘hard problem of consciousness‘). Consciousness is differing from many other, more diffuse, and more graded non-human sentient experiences and is just one of widely distributed modes of thought and feeling developed and existing all around us. It is important to emphasize that the difference is only in degree, not in kind. A proper evolutionary account of human consciousness has to take this wide spectrum of sentience seriously. Transfer is not neutral to its substrate, nor is it about the perfectibility of transfer. It gathers momentum after a slow burn for the possibility that cross-overs of all sorts are happening, nothing staying the same or isolated (as just body or minds). Consciousness, POW, perspectives get changed as they get transferred, expanded and dilated by these literal in’s and out’s of each other’s embodied experiences.
Nothing could be more bizarre as this picnic that seems to get closer to Get Out, although getting out is actually always linked with someone other getting in
Unintended pregnancies are some of the worst cases of breeder culture SF, where everybody stumbles into it accidentally, especially in places where it is widely available. Such accident always feel scripted. Apart from this emplotment fluke that is not a fluke, there is also the possibility that the older white women actually enjoys her surrogate bodies pregnancy. Sarah the real cum surrogate mom realizes that she will be just a ‘womb’ and somehow giving her baby to adoption is the only choice. Although it is just starting, here the terms of appropriation are all biocultural – in a patriarchal capitalist society where women’s bodies from the Global South are already carrying out this reproductive labour in the name of white ‘low natality’ rich others. Full Surrogacy Now! starts with the current situation but asks for reproductive equality and justice. Cultural appropriation (ex white rap) somehow precludes the fact that identity politics goes and in hand with a rapid commodification (like in the nativist Nike logos) of the ‘native’ or or the ‘indigenous’. Indigenous knownledges that gets deleted at the same time as more material, biological forms of biocapital get indexed and turned into ‘green gold’. In biopunk such as Paolo Bacigalupi Wind Up Girl – follows these constant and hard to represent transfer of seeds, cultivars, genes, bodies, hybrids – mined and escaping from the agroindustry biotech labs. as well as traded by biohackers that are in a constant search for seeds, breeds and long lost or potentially valuable and forgotten heirlooms cultivars.
Bodies and their feelings (good or bad) also get rapidly appropriated in this biopunk world of genetic copyrighting and bio hunting. This is why movies such as Transfer are needed in order to follow up on those consequences and think the unthinkable of unlivable situations. Not sure how the movie ends, I would have to see it one more time, yet according to other reviewers, it appears to be another bad deal in the sense that the African parents are actually remunerated with just 1% for their troubles.
timespace coordinates: Cairn, a dark, war-torn world (loosely based on the Victorian era) where a once proud empire has been brought to ruin and the human race driven to the edge of extinction. Cairn has become ground zero of an eternal war between two otherworldly powers, the Aetherials and Chthonians, one seeking to use human bodies as a resource, the other intent upon destroying the human race before that can happen.
Enter an apocalyptic fantasy world where humanity is on the brink of extinction, iron is valued above gold and trust is hard earned. This Isometric Hack and slash ARPG features complex character development, hundreds of unique items, crafting and quests with choice & consequence. (steam)
Crate Entertainment is a small indie studio founded by the lead gameplay designer of Titan Quest and includes veterans from such companies as Blizzard North, Irrational and Harmonix.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 10 / Processor: x86 compatible 2.3GHz or faster processor (Intel 2nd generation core i-series or equivalent) / Memory: 2 GB RAM / Graphics: 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series or ATI Radeon X800 series or better / DirectX: Version 9.0c / Storage: 5 GB available space / Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card / Additional Notes: 4GB of memory is required to host multiplayer games
timespace coordinates:The Waste Tide depicts a dystopian China in the post-2020 era. (2040’s -2050’s) In the Guiyu island, the large electronic recycle industries are in full control of local lineage associations. The laborers who undertake dangerous work for the profit of the Chinese and foreign businessmen who employ them are depicted not as humans, but cyborgs whose bodies and minds have been altered permanently through bio-engineering.
The Waste Tide is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Chen Qiufan.
The story takes place in the imaginary ”Silicon Isle”. The Chinese word ”硅屿” for Silicon Isle shares a similar pronunciation with Guiyu (Chinese: 贵屿) in Mandarin. In the real world, Guiyu is a town in the Shantouprefecture of Guangdong province in China. And it is Shantou where Chen Qiufan was born and grew up before he entered Peking University. Situated on the South China Sea coast, Guiyu got famous in the global environmentalist community for its reception of E-waste. The town held the record for being the largest E-waste site up to 2013. Though some residents got rich by electronic recycling, pollution became serious in the town. Talking about the background of writing the novel, Chen said: ”Choosing my hometown as background to write the story, is related to my thinking of China. To depict the pain of changing China, is just because I desire for she getting better gradually.’ (wiki)
“he is conscious of the Seminary expanding ancient and vast on all sides—the yawning cold hallways like caverns of stone, the dank subvestries and classrooms with bubbling peeling plaster walls and a mildewed smell, frosty choirs of icy wood polished to a dull luster by the chafing of nervous hands.”
“schooled exclusively in cold places, always rain and chill waiting outside the walls; he would anxiously look forward to the halfhearted springs and moist, wilted summers.”
“A flat manylegged object exhaling odorless blue smoke scuttles over his left foot; he’s not disgusted, he doesn’t flinch.”
“Although he can’t see, there are shapes around him, darker shadows looming against the dark like cliffs and frothings like sea foam.There are things that seem like panels of transparence, windows, lightless as everything else but looking as if he’s peering through something, from one dark to another.”
“the streets buck and shift like the deck of a doomed ship, the air rises in hot transparent coils so that the city distorts, as if viewed through a window of wrinkled glass. The outlines of the buildings around him billow like smoke, they hide enormous roaring engines, legions of enemies.”
“his great coat is so black and terrible it’s almost leaking darkness, it smudges the air around him like a pall of coal smoke.”
“Passing the cemetery, he sees huge pulsing trees burrowing into graves with their roots, their branches forking like capillaries into fleshy clouds.”
Short but powerful, this neo-gothic novel, uses the crisp immediacy of the present tense to lead the reader on a hallucinatory journey from humanity to inhuman transcendence. After a miraculous recovery from near death, a young man known only as the Divinity Student is beset by strange dreams whose lingering effects further alienate him from his fellows.
The Waste Tide is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer 
TimeSpace Warps 