prosthetic knowledge
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I know its not that much of a big deal, but when someone you have a lot of respect for tweets a post you made, you can’t help feel a little awe …
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BBC iPlayer - William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition' 
William Gibson’s cult thriller is serialized this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra - Episodes 1 & 2 are up. Each episode is 30 minutes. Not sure, though, if they are available outside of the UK.
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Cyberpunk - documentary via cold-war
60 minute video documentary from 1990 featuring a rare interview with William Gibson.
From streettech.com:
“Cyberpunk” is a 60-minute documentary, the ad for which states: “What started as a book became a literary movement. What was a literary movement became a subculture”.
And that’s one of the major flaws of this film. It perpetuates the general myth that everything “cyberpunk” expanded out of “Neuromancer” and Gibson’s vision. In truth, most of the stuff covered here (virtual reality, hacking, industrial music, cybernetics, designer drugs, anarchy) was already developing quite nicely before Lord Gibson, Chairman Bruce, and the rest (Shirley, Rucker, Shiner) were kind enough to provide a fictional universe in which to fuse these disparate explorations.
The production of “Cyberpunk” is very inconsistent, too — some parts are professional documentary, while other parts have the odor of quick-cash opportunism. The breathy women narrator is ultimately aggravating, oh-ing and ah-ing over all this stuff.But there is some good material here, including interviews with Gibson, Leary, Scott Fisher (of NASA/Ames), Brenda Laurel, Vernon Reed (Living Color), Bill Leeb (Front Line Assembly) and others. There’s also some cool computer graphics (circa 1989) and an industrial soundtrack with Front Line Assembly, Ministry, and Severed Heads.
“Cyberpunk” is still a must-see since it’s the only documentary about cyberpunk that we have.
Produced and Directed by Marianne Trench and Peter von Brandenberg.
Intercon Productions, 1990. -
“I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them-it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.” — William Gibson discusses the origins of the idea for Cyberspace, which came from watching people play arcade machines -
Neuromancer movie in pre-production confirmed :D
Seven Arts Pictures and GFM Films announced today that “Neuromancer,” written and directed by Vincenzo Natali and adapted from the William Gibson best-selling novel, has secured sales from distributors in the first three days of Cannes. Territories licensed include: South Korea and Thailand, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, CIS, Poland, and the Middle East.
“Response to this cult cyberspace thriller has been tremendous and the film ticks a lot of boxes with distributors. The film will be a Canadian-European co-production with principal photography occurring in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London. Work on the visual effects has already begun, with an anticipated start date in the first quarter of 2012,” said Kate Hoffman, Chief Operating Officer of Seven Arts. GFM also reported advanced discussions in Germany, the UK, France, and the USA.
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“Last year I thought about the first time I traveled through Europe, which was in 1970. When I traveled through Europe, each country had not only its own currency but its own brands of cigarettes, its own everything. That was such a wonderful experience. Each country in Europe was a pocket universe. That’s gone. It’s just gone. They all just have EU stuff and a lot of American stuff and a lot of Japanese stuff. It’s not as charming. But it’s the way it is. I don’t really see how we could have kept it the way it was. I don’t feel nostalgia for what it was. I’ve become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it’s usually attached to something else that’s really, seriously bad. I don’t traffic in nostalgia. We’re becoming a global culture.” -
“Michael Mann told me that people experience movies *backward*, as they leave the theater; the climax/ending is really the beginning.” — GreatDismal (aka William Gibson via Twitter) -
“Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it, yet… Reality can’t be copyrighted.” — William Gibson (via myserendipities) -
Burning Chrome by William Gibson 1986, cover art by Richard Berry, 1986
(via Travess Smalley / none00)
