Digital Gothic: the techno-cultural narrative of Bruce Sterling's dark euphoria, in Art+Australia / Amazon, Colless, E (ed), Art+ publications, (2021)

In 2009 at the Reboot 11 conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling delivered one of his signature “closing rants” in which he 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 freefall – between the duality of shiny techno-futurism and its dark gothic underbelly. This paper will seek to unpack not only the nature and texture of the fall but the accumulative image bank upon which this scene is etched. Game worlds, Hollywood cinema and television all prophesize the post-millennial technological catastrophe in a variety of lusty visual forms.