To browse Academia. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on texts literary, cinematic, and new media which depict varying conceptions of technology, virtuality, and their effects.
Even the most basic sense of what counts as an environment in the first place depends on the interfaces one uses. The Introduction examines the ambiguities surrounding the terms of its own investigation: cyberculture, ecology, interface, nature, virtuality. And now we come to the end of this decade, and there's this wonderful movie out called Avatar in which it's only by going into this make-believe world a man can truly fulfill his potential, can rewrite history.
It's sort of a Native-American parable in which we actually go back and save the Native Americans from the imperialist, capitalist forces that would wipe them out.
Those themes are considered in a media-ecological and media-archaeological framework. In addition, some of the conceptual tools proposed in the talks are being used for reflecting upon the special context in which this edition of the MAGIS Spring School happened.
Even though it is often presented as an unprecedented technology, virtual reality VR is a new medium as much as it is an old one and an imaginary one. On the one hand, if the first VR experiments date from the s, virtual technologies have been long foreshadowed by intermedia fictional worlds, that still nourish the imaginary texture of VR and even seem to dictate the agenda of its concretisation-as in the case of the Metaverse metaphor originated in the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
