User:Emily/RW&RM/Trimester 02/03

The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems

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Intro
Benjamin’s text published in 1936, when film was still young; while Nichols’s was published in 1988, when video games and other simulation media were young. Within this text, Nichols will discuss this shift from fetishisation of the object to fetishisation of the process of interaction, of simulation. With some examples of simulation to video games and genetic engineering, it reveals ideology becomes more clearly a subject.

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Cybernetic systems include an entire array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power., which all exhibit a capacity to process information and execute actions. The computer is an icon and a metaphor symbolising the entire spectrum of networks, systems and devices. With in the article Nichols contrast characteristics of cybernetic systems with those of mechanical reproduction and establish a central metaphor to help to understand these cybernetic systems, and prompt the question that how this metaphor acquires the force of the real. The work of culture will be discussed in focus

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What at the heart of the change in mechanical reproduction that effects the work of art is the impossibility of reproducing its authenticity. However, it emancipates art from its parasitical dependence on ritual, and turn to a new basis in politics, which are held in check by the economic system surrounding the means of mechanical reproduction.

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A radical change in the nature of art implies that our very ways of seeing the world have also changed. Through montage film achieves the changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator, which strongly testifies to this new form of machine-age-perception.

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What potential can be located in the computer and its cybernetic systems, similar with the situation of cinema, must be defused and contained by the industries of information. The process of adopting new ways of seeing that consequently propose new forms of social organisation, which becomes a paradoxical, or dialectical process but goes forward all the same.

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Nichols puts forward the question is our "sense of reality" being adjusted by new means of electronic computation and digital communication? Then he lists the power, products and human sense in the age of industrial capitalism.

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Cybernetic Systems and Electronic Culture
Simulacra introduce the key question of how the control of information moves towards control of sensory experience, interpretation, intelligence, and knowledge. The power of the simulation moves to the heart of the cybernetic matter.

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Human identity subject to change vulnerable to challenge and modification as the very metaphors prompted by the imaginary Others that give it form themselves change.

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