Screen Circuits

SCREEN CIRCUITS
Fear & Loathing in the Sprawl (circa. 1995)

Feature essay | Screen Circuits: Fear & Loathing in the Sprawl (circa. 1995)
MC Journal,  Vol. 21 No. 5: nineties | 2018

Image credit: Mitch Goodwin (2018) “Portable Gibson”, from the Screen Circuits series

ABSTRACT

The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing. There was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a violent century of accelerationism and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspectives of the machine, the lens and the streams of data that were only just beginning to be stockpiled and re-hashed across the salty pipes of the “information superhighway”.

Meanwhile, at the movies a seemingly grave warning was being issued as to what all of this might mean by interrogating a percieved social anxiety around a rapidly evolving information economy, whispers of a virtual reality and the growing hysteria around Y2K. What if we could indeed become virtual? What if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself?

From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995), these mid-nineties “net-politation” films tapped a rich vein of paranoia. Maturing also was computer-generated image (CGI) which expressed - in often garish terms - a suppoed latent fear and anxiety of a future-present matrix crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

Image credit: Mitch Goodwin (2018) “The Squid Doctor”, from the Screen Circuits series

The full article is available at M/C Journal
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