Cyberpunk: from then to now

 In some of my previous posts, I have mentioned this artistic genre and my interest in it. But I decided to research mor in depth, since as it will be greatley involved with my studio work.

-Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a future setting that tends to focus on the society of the proverbial "high tech low life"; featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as information technology and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.

One of the most well know exhamples of this is the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", better known as Blade Runner; George Orwell's "1984" falls into the same category.

The running theme in works of this style is the Dystopian future and need of rebellion to return to a peaceful and just society.
This kind of story line not only occures in films but in gaming as well, in titles such as Fallout and Half Life.

Cyberpunk has also evolved and found its way into figuartive art andfashion design.

 

Cyberpunk now has now evolvrd intoa cultural trend, reffered to as Cybergoth,with its own style and music, expressing the querkyness and oddity of the genre itself.

 

Design Fiction: Alternate Worlds

As mentioned in a previous post design fictions focus around narrative and storytelling, most of the time creating an entirely different universe from our own. In fact, its extremley common in fantsy and scifi works, as we take Middle Earth from Tolkien's Hobbit, or perhaps more recently Westeros from George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones.

 

With this in mind, its interesting to think how many fictional universes have been created since the begging of fiction work as a whole. 

If we analyse the previously mentioned works of Phillip Pullman, we notice that the story unfolds in a universe almost completley pararel to our own, but with major diffrences that underline its almost alien qualities. The buildings and locations described are mostly the same as ones that exist, but with major architectural characteristics; machinery and mode of transport function in a mechanical manner, poewred by electricity and otherworldly forces; and in this new Earth, the existance of a kingdom ruled by sentient polar bears, the Pansebjorne.

The plot of the books themseves focus on the concept of the reality of other worlds, universes conncected by a subsance called Dust. These worlds intertwine and connect and the similarities between many of them and ours is uncanny. 

We see something very similar in the 1982 film Tron, in which the protagonist, owner of an arcade, develops new technology that allows him to eneter the Grid, the progammed world of the arcade game Tron, revealing a world with its own social system, classes, justice system and with a completly different biology, of both the enviroment and the characters them sleve, no longer organic beings but lines of code that disintigrate into pixels when terminated.

Looking at these two completley different works of fiction, and their own universes, we can see how the both translate extremely well into the Multiverse Theory

-The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of finite and infinite possible universes, including the universe in which we live. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the physical laws and constants that describe them.
The various universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes" or "alternate universes."

With this in mind, altough childish, the possibility of worlds like Westeros, Middle Earth and the Grid being actual existing universes is an exiting and inspiring though, that stimulates new possibilities in creating fictonal work.