Category Archives: movies

Tech Noir meets ds106?

Miles, his friend Andy, and I caught a rather clean, but brooding, 35MM print of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) at the Library of Congress, Packard Campus in Culpeper, VA last night. I got to thinking that Empire is very much inline with aesthetic of other tech noirs at the time. It got me thinking a potential theme for next semester’s ds106 might be tech noir hosted by Dr. Oblivion. Here are the films I was thinking about including:

Continue reading →

Tech Noir

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).

TechNoir

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 →