A pre-recorded video ‘performance’ of my research into the Digital Gothic for the Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging, in November 2020. The recording format allowed for a more performative analysis of the nature and texture of the the post-millennial technological catastrophe and our place within it.

Abstract

A black silhouette spiraling out of control is an image imprint that runs from Vertigo to Kubrick to the eerie repose of the falling man on 9/11. This paper will seek to examine not only the nature and texture of the fall but the accumulative image bank upon which this this scene is etched. Game worlds, Hollywood cinema and television all prophesize the post-millennial technological catastrophe in a variety of lusty visual forms. What however, does the end actually look like? Down in the weeds as it were. What are the signature tropes of such mediated ecologies – of networks, precious metals, silicon and liquid colour. The tangible stuff that give an aesthetics of darkness its permanent and enduring form?

In this conflicting age of techno-cultural seduction and environmental anxiety - in this Anthropocene of our creation - the desirable sci-fi trope of speculative futurists, “the return to the farm,” is no longer viable. We passed it somewhere on the way down. The image of the Earth, as captured by Apollo 8, co-opted by Stuart Brand, digitised by Google and commodified by Amazon has consolidated its virtual turn. So where does that narrative of affect and virtuality turn next?

In 2009 at the Reboot 11 conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling characterised the coming decade as being overwhelmed by a sense of dark euphoria. The primary image he conjured was of a generation “afraid of the sky”, a state of endless free-fall - between the duality of shiny techno-futurism and its dark gothic underbelly.

The twenty-teens are now behind us of course, and 2020 has certainly arrived with a clang, but it doesn’t feel like a “non-twentieth century space”. The darkness from which we seek to emerge persists – the forever war, surveillance architecture, the attention economy and platform capitalism endure, indeed they thrive. Now that the present is no longer rushing up from below, how do we navigate the final Act of Sterling's gothic moment?

Reference Links

Digital Gothic: the techno-cultural narrative of Bruce Sterling's dark euphoria, Art+Australia, Mitch Goodwin, 2020
https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Digital_Gothic_the_Techno-cultural_Narrative_of_Bruce_Sterling_s_Dark_Euphoria/16993285

Gothic High-Tech and Favela Chic, Reboot 11, Copenhagen, Denmark, Bruce Sterling, 2009
https://youtu.be/7dqNPzZUNmg

Dark Euphoria: The Neo Gothic Narrative of Millennial Technoculture, PhD thesis, Griffith University, Mitch Goodwin, 2014
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/items/cc8ddba8-aaa9-5ec9-a1e6-9f6570da7835