Watch: Sleep Dealer (Rivera, 2009)
Read: Everette, Anna. “digitextuality and click theory: theses on convergence media in the digital age.” New Media: Theories and practices of digitextuality. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
While I personally feel that cyberpunk is a very interesting genre because of its depictions of humans interacting with virtual spaces, the only cyberpunk film that I included in my syllabus was the Spanish film Sleep Dealer (2009). This film deals with current issues such as illegal immigration and telecommuting by portraying Mexican workers who plug their consciousness into labour robots abroad, an advanced version of telecommuting. The reading that I paired this film with continues teaching intertextuality and develops a concept Everette refers to as “digitextuality.” This is a development of Julie Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality that basically understands that “every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text is absorption and transformation of another text.” Digitextuality is an amalgam of this concept, fused with the understanding that digital media is breaking off from traditional media, and new media is being constructed and used in different ways than traditional media was. I felt this related well with the film’s portrayal of telecommuting in the future and how technology might facilitate these disembodied jobs in the future.
Edited: December 28th, 2009
