Category Archives: Tech Noir

Down by GIF

Today’s Daily Create instructions were to visualize The Scream, but since I saw Down by Law way back when, “scream” suggests a different image. If I were smart I would have realized that someone must have made this GIF before, but as it is I just dove in and made my own. I used this video clip with Imgflip to make the base GIF, then opened it in Photoshop and deleted 3 of every 4 layers to bring the size down, then inserted the type layers and merged them with the image layers, rather tediously. There’s a better way to do that, I’m sure, and if I did this more often I might know and remember it. In any case, I made a thing, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? , as they say.

Talking Tech Noir, part deux

We’re working with a them of Tech Noir in ds106 this semester, and as I mentioned before, we can’t really expect the class to know what we’re talking about, so Jim and I recorded a half-hour discussion which hopefully brings some clarity. We discuss meanings, themes and history, where we are and where we may want to go.

We have a list of Tech Noir/Cyberpunk media to help people get familiar. Is there anything that should be added?

Week One: Greetings

1/13/25-1/17/25

All work is due by midnight on Friday, 1/17/25

Welcome to ds106! This first week is dedicated to getting set up: set up your domain and Web hosting; install your WordPress site; and create other social media accounts such as Mastodon, and Discord. The sooner you get started, the better. If you run into trouble after looking through the supporting links, the Digital Knowledge Center is a great place to go for in-person help.
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Tech Noir 106

Jim had talked about doing a Tech Noir themed course many years ago, and now we’re looking to revisit the idea. It feels appropriate to the times. I can’t expect everyone to be an aficionado of the genre though, so I’m thinking about ways to be expansive with it, to offer people more ways to connect. Incorporating cyberpunk is an obvious one. I also want to add Technopoly to bring a philosophical lens to the idea.
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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:

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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