Sunday, July 3, 2011

Saluting Futurists! pt 2

 I should have added this name to the previous blog, but I think he deserves a section of his own...

Shirow Masamune. Imagine a world where you are linked in to the internet, constantly. The hardware is in your body. Or the hardware is your body, as you may be partially or fully cybernetic. You interface with translucent media player skins that appear before your eyes. A.I.s wonder if they can have souls or "ghosts" that survive beyond death...

The police and military have tanks with Artificial Intelligence, that sound like children when they speak. They have active camouflage body suits, rendering them near invisible. A Computer hacker can render himself invisible to you by hacking the processors in your cybernetic eyes...

That's the world of Ghost in the Shell. In the midst of the action adventure, you suddenly have characters dropping references to philosophers like Arthur Koestler or Frederick Jameson.

The character, "The laughing man" has a popularity among the Anonymous -sympathetic crowd only exceeded by their fondness for Alan Moore's "V". This is, no doubt, because both characters represent chaotic good while remaining faceless... Indeed, the laughing man can be interpreted as a wishful representation of what a hacker wants to be..

Masamune shows us a world of Virtual realities & Augmented realities, and dares us to determine which is more "real". His work is spiritually akin to Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" & "A Scanner Darkly" in it's testing of phenomenology..

If Raymond Kurzweil is to be believed... Masamune's future is almost upon us...

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