Watched Terminator (1984) tonight and love that Kyle Reese and the Terminator first open fire on one another is a kind of punk/new wave bar call Tech Noir (according to the Wikipedia article it’s the inspiration for an entire genre of noir).

The Wikipedia article is underdeveloped, and it would be a great thematic focus for a course on culture during the 1980s. A push to develop the concept of tech and noir during a decade that brought us everything from the C64 to cyberpunk to Max Headroom. How can we understand the emergence and convergence of  techology, literature, film, and theory in the 1980s? The idea of a course focused specifically on the material culture of a decade is one GNA Garcia and I kicked around last year, and I still would really like to do it. Continue reading →