I tried to make a ds106 comeback last year with the AI 106 course, but it turns out I wasn’t even up to getting off the couch. It was a long winter, and quite a few of my responsibilities were put on pause while I worked on my mental health. There are those moments we all face, and last Spring was one of them for me. I’m just fortunate I have such amazing folks around me online and off.
Film Noir and the dark technology of armored cars with shot from the film Criss Cross.
But this semester is a new day and the bava is back in the ds106 driver seat alongside Paul Bond. Paul gave me a free pass last spring with AI 106 and for that I’m forever grateful. The bummer was I really did want to jump back into the fray, and watching AI106 from the sidelines highlighted how much fun I was missing out on. The mock AI company Aggressive Technologies born from that course experience was absolutely brilliant, and to see that group dig into the ds106 ethos of joy was, well ….a joy.
Tech Noir bar from The Terminator
This week begins yet another chapter of ds106, this time focused on a topic that I have been thinking about doing for at least ten years: Tech Noir. My mind immediately goes to movies from the 40+ years ago like Alien, Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, and Terminator, but that’s just my opinion, man. As part of week 1’s intro, Paul and I discussed the broader noir theme in terms of 1940s Hollywood to help frame the qualified tech-focused nature of this genre that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, since its inception the themes defining noir quickly transcended film to include literature, design, video games, and much more.
Also, let’s not forget that back in the Spring of 2015 Paul, Martha Burtis, and I taught noir106 during my last full semester at UMW. So exactly ten years later we’re back to noir, but this time with a qualifier most relevant to our moment: technology. Paul did a nice job of locating Tech Noir in terms of the cyberpunk 80s in his “Tech Noir ds106” post::
Tech Noir was a thing of the 80s. The preceding decades had seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, the corruption of Watergate, years of inflation followed by a deep recession, with ah ever-present awareness that WWIII could be right around the corner. On top of that, computers were migrating from the realm of science fiction into people’s everyday lives and homes. So that bleakness returned, in considering where we might be going as a society.
An interesting thing about Tech Noir and cyberpunk is that they tend to look at a near future, a future that may now be in the past, like 1984. One could argue the extent to which they were right or wrong in their visions, but I think the point of sci fi is not to be prophetic but to examine the current moment through an imagined setting.
Damn Paul’s good! He’s also very mindful that focusing too much on our interests defeats the purpose of ds106. We want to try and develop a theme and then have the class run with it in directions that interest them. As a result they should be more compelled to write, design, mash-up, and playact a world of media that buoy their creativity—thankfully noir is broad enough to contain multitudes.
A GIF from Richard Siodomak’s The Killers
The other thing I like about ds106 is it always inspires me to blog and comment, which are two of the things I resolved to do more of this year. ds106 is kinda like a gym for bloggers.
Finally, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Mastodon has been feeling pretty fun these days. I know it has its limits, but I ‘ve been getting help with designing the the new old course site (thank you, Alan and Tom!), the daily creates are still on fire, we’re already streaming ds06radio there. Who knows, the social.ds106.us server could be a way of interfacing the students with the network like we could with Twitter. Hope springs eternal in the ds106 breast.
You know it’s good when you have Grant Potter dropping knowledge about Criterion’s current Surveillance Cinema series or the video game series Watchdogs or even that crazy Japanese contribution to Tech Noir: Tetsuo: the Iron Man. That’s just the kind of in-passing comraderie that made ds106 so amazing back in 2011 and allowed the class to move beyond the limits of our imagination. There’s something about having a loose, open space for sharing that makes the endeavor exciting. What’s more, given we control our own Mastodon server we can control the adverse effects given we control the vertical and the horizontal. I mean wasn’t that what this was all about?
Blah blah blah, it’s all fine and good to blog blog blog but ds106 is about making some art, dammit. All this analyzing is paralyzing, it’s time to play this dang thing….#4life!