scholarly journals Real and Semi-Real – an Architectural Backstory for Flusser’s Dual Scientific Fictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
William Hanff
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Fantastic

Vilém Flusser’s approaches to epistemology and science fiction are explored in connection with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger and other late 19th and early 20th century philosophies, as well as using an architectural metaphor of scaffolding and blueprints. From his 1980 essay “Science Fiction” Flusser’s two approaches to science fictions are labeled as 1) a ‘falsification strategy’ and 2) an ‘epistemology of improbability.’ These are further explored as metaphors for architecture and building based on ideas from his “Wittgenstein’s Architecture” in The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design and compared and contrasted with visual metaphors of the fantastic in the paper architecture called The Obscure Cities series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Further reinforcing the connection between Flusser’s and Vaihinger’s philosophies, semi-fictions and real fictions are envisioned as a type of new media architecture.

scholarly journals Real and Semi-Real – an Architectural Backstory for Flusser’s Dual Scientific Fictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
William Hanff
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Fantastic

Vilém Flusser’s approaches to epistemology and science fiction are explored in connection with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger and other late 19th and early 20th century philosophies, as well as using an architectural metaphor of scaffolding and blueprints. From his 1980 essay “Science Fiction” Flusser’s two approaches to science fictions are labeled as 1) a ‘falsification strategy’ and 2) an ‘epistemology of improbability.’ These are further explored as metaphors for architecture and building based on ideas from his “Wittgenstein’s Architecture” in The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design and compared and contrasted with visual metaphors of the fantastic in the paper architecture called The Obscure Cities series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Further reinforcing the connection between Flusser’s and Vaihinger’s philosophies, semi-fictions and real fictions are envisioned as a type of new media architecture.

Ideology and Futurology in Early 20th-Century Britain: Wells, Haldane, Bernal, and Their Critics

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Collective Mentality

This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Asians and Asian Americans in Early Science Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
The Invisible

This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.

Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Socialist Politics ◽  
Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A Scots Quair—Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934). While the majority of critical attention has focused on this trilogy, Mitchell published a wide body of work, ranging from historical fiction to archaeological adventure to science fiction. His work often reflects a leftist, anarcho-socialist politics and a diffusionist worldview, in which modern civilization progressively distances humanity from a primitive, utopian state of being. Mitchell published seventeen books, fifteen between 1931 and 1934, before dying at the age of thirty-four.

scholarly journals Facing the Monsters: Otherness in H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Hellboy

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
David McConeghy
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Pacific Rim ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Rudolf Otto

What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific Rim and Hellboy, monsters that would have been obscured to protect Lovecraft’s readers are now fully revealed for Hollywood audiences. Using the period-appropriate theories of Rudolf Otto on the numinous and Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, that share Lovecraft’s troubled history with racist othering, I show how modern adaptations of Lovecraft’s work invert central features of the mythos in order to turn tragedies into triumphs. The genres of Science Fiction and Horror have deep commitments to the theme of otherness, but in Lovecraft’s works otherness is insurmountable. Today, Hollywood borrows the tropes of Lovecraftian horror but relies on bridging the gap between humanity and its monstrous others to reveal a higher humanity forged through difference and diversity. This suggests that otherness in modern science fiction is a means of reconciliation, a way for the monsters to be defeated rather than the source of terror as they were in Lovecraft’s stories.

scholarly journals Keeping it real

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sita Popat
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Mixed Reality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Art Installation

This article employs the writings of early 20th-century phenomenologists to examine physical/virtual dualism a century later. It considers the nature of embodied experience in mixed reality environments through an analysis of the author’s encounter with an art installation. The article reflects on post-Cartesian approaches to the body and new media, noting the resistance of the language of philosophy to the articulation of mixed reality as a concept. If the language of the field constructs dualism, and the cyborgian unitization of human/technology invokes responses of horror or pity, are we prepared socially or culturally to inhabit mixed reality environments as embodied beings?

scholarly journals Early Musical Impressions from Both Sides of the Loudspeaker

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 67-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sérgio Freire
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking

Ametaphoric image of the loudspeaker and its sides sums up the spatio-temporal ruptures that started shaping aural perception in the late 19th century: on one side, the listener; on the other, sound events conveyed by phonographic products, radio and various sound-recording devices. Diverse practices as well as samples of theoretical and aesthetic thinking from the early 20th century illustrate how new media have affected the musical imagination and listening in general.

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