Cyberpunk, as has been pointed out in the introduction to this volume, is ideally equipped to negotiate the boundaries of humanist categories and their claim to universal subjectivity. The cultural formation, in all its forms and practices, is thus contributing to critical posthumanism by challenging those boundaries and providing expression for Donna Haraway’s claim that the “dicho­tomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically” (163) due to late-20th century technocultural changes. 

But cyberpunk is even more relevant today in that it provides the images for a negotiation of power that Nicholas Mirzoeff calls ‘visuality’, which he sees as “the production of a set of social organizations and processes” that form authority (Right 5). In his view, visuality is the “visualization of history” (Right 2), granting the authority of interpreting signs and determining how we think about that which is seen and how it is seen. His simple, but also effective, example of visuality is the sentence, uttered by police, politician, corporation alike, that we should “‘Move on, there’s nothing to see here.’ Only there is, and we know it and so do they” (Right 1). Visuality allows authority to deter us from seeing, to manipulate that which is seen and how it is interpreted. In our time of technological progress and shifting human boundaries—those changes described in cyberpunk—visuality has become what Mirzoeff calls the “post-panoptical visuality” (Right 18), embracing the processes and the ascendency of the digital in order to enact global biopolitical power via cultural visualization. Keeping authority is not a matter of conflict zones anymore, instead “everywhere needs to be watched from multiple locations” and strategies of control need to incorporate “history, culture, and other sets of ‘invisible’ information into the topography” (Right 19). 

In contrast, and as reaction to the authoritative claim of visuality stands countervisuality, which operates as the “claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable” and “refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power” (Mirzoeff, Right 1, 25). At the heart of this countervisuality is thus a belonging, a mutual understanding, or a look back at the other: “The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity” (Right 1). Looking back, demanding the right to see and be seen, is thus a defiant gesture and a demand to subjectivity.

            In cyberpunk’s visual cultural expressions, we can then find acutely tuned engagements with this post-panoptical visuality and a possible countervisuality – posing such questions as: Who gets to see and determine categories of subjectivity? Who gets to interpret life as worthy or relevant? What information or images are used to make these determinations? At the same time, cyberpunk can showcase acts of resistance to authority by embracing the tensions inherent in posthumanism by allowing hybrid forms of subjectivity or challenging hegemonic interpretations of visuality. Returning to the exemplary elements identified in the introduction of this volume— cityscapes, posthumanism, and cyberspace—I want to illustrate how cyberpunk opens up discourse within this spectrum of visuality by deploying tactics of countervisuality.

1. Cities: Vertical and/or Sprawling

One of the most widely-used images of cyberpunk is its placement in urban sprawls and far-reaching cityscapes—from Neuromancer’s Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan Axis to Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One. As Pawel Frelik discusses in his essay, the cityscape of Blade Runner’s (Scott 1982) Los Angeles and its neon-light visions have become emblematic of any science-fictional city, but it is the image of power distribution that is relevant to the city’s function in visuality. Blade Runner reimagines Los Angeles not just as a vertical city (a staple of science fiction imagery signaling futurity, progress, and humanity’s aim of reaching beyond its limits), but as “a vertically segregated world in which power means being above everyone else” (Mirzoeff, Introduction 247). In Scott’s film, power and control lie in the mobility to not only be above the masses but to move freely, with authority showing off a lack of geographical entanglement thanks to personal aircrafts while the mass of people are tethered to the ground, slowly navigating the throngs of overcrowded and litter-filled streets by foot or, at best, bicycle. 

It is the imagery of power connected to flight and mobility in the limits of city space that functions according to the logics of visuality. It is akin to what James Donald describes (referencing Michel de Certeau) as the panoramic view, understood as a “desire to make the city an object of knowledge and governable space … render[ing] the city transparent” (78). From the perspective of elevated power and mobility, the city becomes an object to be regulated, categorized, segmented, and controlled, “a dehumanised geometry” (Donald 77) that can easily be navigated. In describing the privileged position from ‘above,’ Donald is in line with Mirzoeff’s post-panoptic visuality which “produces a visualized authority whose location not only cannot be determined from the visual technologies being used but may itself be invisible” (Right 20), chiefly because it is so removed from those it sees ‘below.’ Central to its power is the ability, granted by digital technology and distance from the object, to “toggle between image sets, zoom in and out of an image  … [to] compare them to databases of previous imagery” (Right 20). The technology grants the power to control what is seen over great distances, connect it with relevant information, and create agency by manipulating the objects seen remotely.   

In cyberpunk, this image of power as mobility or authority moving and surveying from above is found most importantly in the vertical cityscapes that separate and categorize by status or in the all-encompassing Sprawl that nonetheless needs a vertical escape, a re-moving from the ground to navigate with ease. The image is found in the endless repetition of Megacity One in Dredd (Travis 2012), which can only be navigated by the Judges via satellite imagery and computer guidance, as much as it is in the ‘up’ and ‘down’ hierarchy of the slum tower Peach Trees, where drug lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) rules her two-hundred story kingdom from the penthouse and the surveillance control room. It is re-imagined in films such as Total Recall (Wisemann 2012), where power lies in the hierarchical ‘above’ of the global north of Europe, which controls the ‘below’ of the global south of Australia. Similarly, as discussed in Mark Bould’s essay, Elysium (Blomkamp 2013) shifts the discourse of mobility towards an elevated power position (‘up’) in the form of an orbital platform digitally surveying the ground and controlling the space necessary to reach it via shuttle and the ‘down’ found in the utter immobility of a sprawling Los Angeles. But visuality as the power afforded by the ‘panoramic view’ is never more prominent than in the adaptable and scalable views from above in the video game series Watch Dogs (Ubisoft 2014), as described in Jenna Ng and Jamie Macdonald’s essay, where birds-eye map views allow for a transformation of the city into manageable data, readily manipulated by those in power. 

That this mobile, tactical, and informational view from above reaches into today’s life-world becomes obvious in conventional thrillers, as much as in news reporting on terrorism. When the terrorist attack in London has Fallen(Najafi 2016) has President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) on the run, intelligence agencies coordinate their escape via scalable views of the city that separate safe zones from conflict zones and map out targets and assets on the ground, categorizing the city space into controllable sections. When media news reports of the Paris attacks on November 13th 2015 mapped the location of the attacks via Google Earth and overlaid these images with the terrorist’s movements, zooming effortlessly from street views to Paris as a whole and a global situation, it similarly invokes the same power of control via mobility, digital manipulation, and overview. 

If mobility in and above the city is therefore central to the visuality of cyberpunk, then a countervisuality lies in the same image, with the immobile masses ‘at the bottom’ of the hierarchy. In contrast to the power afforded by the panoramic view from above, the experience of walking the streets is almost mythical in its “labyrinthine reality,” where its citizens “invest places with meaning, memory and desire” (Donald 79, 78). Down on the street, the city is resistant to transparency and categorization, actively challenging the authoritative interpretation of an elevated space by imbuing alternative function and “use” into its objects. The street may have its uses for things, but it is messy, it is adaptive, and it needs someone with “knowledge of the city’s secret lore and languages, and the daring to move at will through its society salons, its ghettos and its underworld” (Donald 79). 

In cyberpunk, this is expressed in the multi-cultural, multi-faceted make-up of the masses, the mixture of individual subjectivities that resists a dehumanizing objectification from above. Citizens of these immobile cities are anything but uniform, showcasing diversity in ethnicity and other forms of identity parameters beyond the western, Christian, wealthy, white, straight, able-bodied, male subject, epitomized in the rave scene in Zion of The Matrix Reloaded (Wachowskis 2003). Further, countervisuality is expressed in an alternative stance towards capitalist consumption, especially in the depiction of non-conforming occupations where cyberpunk stages individual characters drawn from liminal positions, navigating and crossing the boundaries of conformity and social acceptance. Consequently, cyberpunk stages its stories around confrontations and resistances on the fringes of society, from motorcycle gangs (in Akira [Otomo 1988]) to hackers (in Hackers [Softley 1995]). Strange Days (Bigelow 1995), for example, as Anna McFarlane describes in her essay, builds upon racial and class-tensions in the conflict between authority and the nightlife scene, with its conflation of drug-use and entertainment as ways to reject conformist views of behavior.   

And if the countervisual right to look can occupy a defiant position by rejecting visuality and refusing to be objectified in its visualization, then it is no wonder that Bruce Sterling describes cyberpunk resistance to authority via markers of visual style—exemplified in the titular mirrorshades of his anthology. “The reasons for this are not hard to grasp,” Sterling writes: “By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous” (xi). For W. J. T. Mitchell, mirrorshades are countervisual in that they “illustrate the situation of ‘seeing without being seen’ and the masking of the eyes as a common strategy in a visual culture” (353). Characters in cyberpunk thus rely heavily on personal, individualized style as an expression of resistance and non-conformity, as Stina Attebery and Joshua Pearson show in their essay on Cyberpunk 2020, a roleplaying game that foregrounds style as part of the identity construction in a posthuman existence. 

2. Posthuman: Cyborgs and AIs

            As part of its engagements with visuality, cyberpunk is also focused on posthumanism, not just in narrative discussions of the boundaries being transgressed, but also in terms of images connected to the idea of changing subjectivity and ontological categories. Similar to the engagement with cityscapes as being both visualized from above for measures of control (visuality) and denying that dominant control via individual acts of resistance (countervisuality), so too does the posthuman conflate visuality and countervisuality in contradictory images of subjectivity.

            Artificial Intelligences (AI) take on the role of authority and control as natural instruments of informational categorization and manipulation, in part due to their superior processing power. Purely computational aspects of AI are visually indistinguishable from other technological and computerized systems, thus they become visualized as computer technology itself, systems representative of big data gathering and organization—rows of servers, lines of computer wires, electronic circuits. In this visuality, the technological, material component of the AI is a mere box (or several) and therefore as hard and cold as the calculations it represents.

The computational power and the decision processes that make up the AI, though, are part of what James D. Herbert calls “disembodied media” in that they are no longer tied to a material component but only “digitalized images transmitted across the World Wide Web and other electronic networks (which cannot, in any meaningful sense, even be located in one material place)” (456). AIs are de-territorial networks of power that are able to control every aspect of human and non-human existence: they are able to read, categorize, classify, and interpret life as data, which makes them the ultimate globalized authority in post-panoptic visuality. 

            In cyberpunk, however, the AI can become a field of resistance. On the one hand, AIs represent the possibility for cold, hard, technological—i.e., inhuman—decisions; on the other hand, they can interact with human agents and become part of the conflicts, therefore needing a figurative representation. The range that this representation can vary, from a mere voice on the phone in Person of Interest (Nolan 2011-16) or Eagle Eye (Caruso 2008) to images of humans on screen, as in Transcendence (Pfister 2014), or full body projections of humans, as in the Resident Evil film series (Anderson 2002-17) or the Halo game series (Microsoft 2001-present). The AI’s representation as a (partly) human simulacrum is important because it allows for the transfer of human traits onto technological decision-making processes and broader negotiations of posthuman subjectivity, which stresses the right to be seen as much as the right to look. Whereas the AI in WarGames (Badham 1983) is running numbers and text on a screen and is thus representative of the military-industrial visuality at play in the Cold War— inhuman, technical, and treating human life as a variable in its calculation—the Master Control Program in TRON (Lisberger 1982) is represented as a human simulacrum, allowing the film to ascribe emotions and motivation to the cold calculations of the machine. In Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), the AI Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) is reminiscent of contemporary life-world assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa and essentially generates an image of AI as having emotions, motivations, and thus subjectivity: the right to look and to be seen (or at least heard). In this countervisuality of AI as an embodied, individual entity lies a rejection of visuality’s notions of computer systems running massive calculations and processing data for authority, as providers of intelligence to better visualize a theater of operations. But in its human-like depiction also rests a contradiction: the need to address AIs as humanist subjects, visualized as human for our sake, to better realize AI as having its own, individualized agenda. Realizing a truly posthuman subjectivity for AI is thus still some ways off, with cyberpunk taking the easy way out and arguing AI as human subjectivity because of a conflation of humanized traits onto its posthuman decisions.

            Similarly, cyborg figures can represent both visuality and countervisuality in that they integrate and hybridize the dual aspects of technology and the human. They do this in different forms, ranging from machines that simulate humanity in disguised bodies, to humans with technological implants and prosthesis, to biological machines that are programmed like computers. What stands out in these forms is an entity that Donna Haraway calls “a hybrid of machine and organism“ (149) and that disturbs “the categories and statuses of men, women, artifact, racial identities but also bodies and the categories of living/non-living” (Nayar 22). 

            Cyberpunk explores these categorical disturbances by presenting what Christopher McGunnigle in his essay for this anthology discusses under the heading of the “cyborg gaze,” a hybridized form of perspective that highlights the technological input in the form of HUD displays, data read-out, and optical enhancements. Cyborg vision thus clearly falls under the post-panoptic visuality, allowing for categorization and visualization by linking that which is seen to the survey of databases and computational processes (Mirzoeff, Right 40). In The Terminator (Cameron 1984), the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) links that which he sees to a database of images and runs a facial recognition software to determine his target for execution, thus establishing interpretative power and biopolitical authority over those he sees. Similarly, Gabriel Vaughn (Josh Holloway) in the TV series Intelligence (Seitzman 2014) uses the cybernetic uplink in his brain to get satellite views of his surroundings or review government files on the subjects he interviews. In both cases, the cyborg gaze uses technology to establish the right to visualization and interpretation, to project authority onto those seen. 

            As Anneke Smelik has argued, though, the technological aspect of the cyborg gaze is offset by the fact that it makes use of the point-of-view shot, with its techniques such as “mobile framing, close-ups and camera movement, [that] are at the same time powerful cinematic cues for subjectivity” and allow for viewers to identify a quality of “‘human-ness’ of the cyborg” (92). Destabilizing the technological component and granting subjectivity, as discussed in both essays by Timothy Wilcox and Ryan J. Cox in this volume, thus allows cyberpunk to establish a form of countervisuality, the right to look back at the technological domination and authority over its body. As with the AI visuality, cyberpunk clearly imagines a posthuman subjectivity grounded in humanism, by humanizing technological traits, by countering with a ‘cyborg as (still) human’ and not by fully embracing technology as a different embodied form of subjectivity itself. The most pronounced examples of this countervisuality can be found in the re-connection of RoboCop with his humanity (as discussed by McGunnigle) and, of course, in the T-800 (again, Arnold Schwarzenegger) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron 1991), who sacrifices himself to secure a future for humanity—a defiant gesture establishing subjectivity in its self-(de)termination. 

            And again, the cyborg’s visuality is at play in contemporary realist fictional texts as much as it is evoked in life-world situations and images, especially in military scenes depicting troops and their technologically enhanced subjective shots in contemporary war and anti-war film. This is not only exemplarily discussed in Anna McFarlane’s essay on Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow 2012), but also in the now-proliferating body camera footage from police or military actions around the world. One could also extend the cyborg to include drone operators, whose perspective on their theater of operations is similarly technologized, as Sherryl Vint argues in her essay in this anthology for the US drone war in Afghanistan depicted in Good Kill (Niccol 2014) or the fictional Drones TV, as shown in Sleep Dealer (Rivera 2008). 

The cyborg’s countervisuality is most effectively employed in empowering non-normative bodies via technological prosthesis, for example, as amputees or paraplegics overcome their disabilities via cyborg-like implants or gadgets. A powerful ad campaign for the German Aktion Mensch (a non-profit promoting the integration of disadvantage and disabled persons) showcases several pre- and elementary school children discovering technological innovations such as prosthesis, a powered exoskeleton, or computerized wheelchairs with science-fictional awe and meeting the people using them on eye-level, thus revealing the subjectivity of the ‘cyborgs,’ as well as their right to look and be seen. 

3. Cyberspace: Abstract Spaces and Real Worlds

Adopting the image of computers (as material object) as representative of the inhuman algorithms that are constantly exercising their influence over our life-worlds, cyberpunk has in a conflating movement also provided another image of computers as escape mechanisms from this world—that of cyberspace, an image of the space behind the screen. As Brian McHale has pointed out, cyberpunk as a postmodern form deliberately foregrounds its own connection to “the normally invisible horizons of world, the very ‘worldness’ of world” (247) and centers on questions of being via the construction of serial worlds (as in special, representational locations and zones) and most famously parallel worlds: “worlds occupying different ontological planes—worlds and meta-worlds, or worlds and inset worlds (worlds-within-worlds)” (251). Cyberspace is such a meta-world, existing parallel to the material world, which allows cyberpunk to highlight the limits of biology (Gibson’s ‘meatspace’ as prison), the mind/body dichotomy, or issues of control and power. 

            Similar to the (counter)visuality of Artificial Intelligence, the visualizations of cyberspace are two-fold, even in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), where both the abstract geometric representation of the matrix and the realistic silver-grey beach of Case’s flatline experience are generated by computers, one networked and to be accessed by all, the other privately created for Case by the Neuromancer AI. Interestingly, though, both variants reflect the authority of visuality, in that they function to categorize the world and control the individuals using them. 

            The matrix of Neuromancer is, as Mark R. Johnson discusses in his essay for this volume, the most iconic image of cyberspace in that it creates a cohesive representation of the world via markers of spatial relation, coloring, and geometric shapes. Neon-lit grid-lines constitute a minimalist geography, in which “familiar architectural elements” can be found, as Sabine Heuser points out: globes, pyramids, cubes, and arches form structures, built not “with solid materials but invisible data, which are rendered visible by graphic representation” (116). A strong visual for this can be found in TRON, in which humanized programs navigate the simple geometrics of the computer world, and whose depiction of cyberspace is referenced in many variations. Lines represent the flow of electronic impulses and data, information becomes tangible in the form of discs and cubes. The cyberspace world is boundless, it is an infinite three-dimensional grid littered with a variety of forms, abstracted objects that create a visual language incomprehensible to the uninitiated and in need of decoding. 

Similarly opaque are the functions of the code itself, the strings of endless alphanumeric that constitute the workings of the world beyond the screen, best visualized in The Matrix (Wachowskis 1999) as glowing green hieroglyphs rolling over black screens, but already present in WarGames as monochrome pixelated letters typed out on bulky 1970s screens. Whereas the geometrics of cyberspace can be seen as the end-result of this virtual world building, the code is representative of the algorithmic processes leading up to it. But both the process and the result are connected to visuality, to control and authority, allowing interpretation of what is seen only to those initiated in its codes. Especially in its function as meta-world, mapping out the real world in form of digitized data, cyberspace is biopolitical—as demonstrated by Jenna Ng and Jamie Macdonald in their discussion of Watch Dogs—in that it allows for control and manipulation of the world and its inhabitants via its abstracted visualization.  

The visuality of cyberspace and the flows of data and information are now linked to control and interpretational authority. In contemporary discourse, both in realist fiction and life-world examples, it is a stand-in for the opaque workings of systemic control, as for example in the biopic The Fifth Estate (Condon 2013) about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch). The group around Assange uses a programming shell for their communication, instead of the familiar setup of PC operating systems: the coding interface is in black while different portions of the screen displaying monochrome code (of the website and its uploading backend, as well as an internal chat) are visible. In several scenes, the film shows an overlay of glowing strings of text onto dark background, the strings rolling over either the reflection of Julian’s face while typing or the surrounding reflective surfaces. At one point, the code is even shown to encompass and overtake Julian completely, his face obliterated by the neon signs that make very little sense to the viewer. The code is taking over Julian’s and everybody else’s lives, resulting in the physical world swallowed up by its digital counterpart, a stark symbol of WikiLeaks’ fight against digital authority by governments and corporations. 

Abstraction (of code and data) is not the only image of cyberspace evoked by cyberpunk, which also offers a hyperreal version of the world as a meta-world in the computer. This full HD-resolution simulacrum of reality is mostly used to control or pacify the human mind (as an escape or prison), as discussed in the introduction to this volume. In terms of its visual representation, though, the simulacrum is indistinguishable from reality and thus not specifically marked, except in rare cases when its status is deliberately manipulated, such as the training sessions in The Matrixwhere characters can run up walls or complete improbable acrobatics. Otherwise, hyperreal cyberspace “is genetic miniaturization” of our world: “The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these” (Baudrillard 2). This image of a hyperreal is even more strongly tied to visuality and control over visualization than the abstraction of cyberspace, because it is impossible for us to determine what we see. The program, such as the one in The Matrix conveniently symbolized through the ever-present agents (not accidentally acting as simulacra of governmental employees), is in control and actively able to shape the environment in order to manipulate us. 

The power of cyberpunk’s countervisuality then lies in the disruption of this simulacrum, a defiant break in the visualization that allows us to ‘see’ the workings of the machine. In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) calls out that he experiences déjà vu, seeing the same cat move past him twice, which prompts Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) to explain: “A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix … it happens when they change something.” The glitch in the code, a break in the digital processes that make up hyperreality, is thus cyberpunk’s most prominent marker of countervisuality, especially noticeable when the ‘tearing’ effect, the pixelation and pausing that happens in digital transmission, is compromised. The distortion, usually both acoustic and optical, allows us to recognize the constructed and manipulated nature of reality and to reclaim the right to look and to reorganize sensory input accordingly.  

            In contemporary realist film and television, such effects as digital tearing and distortion that are common to science fiction are used similarly to signal countervisuality as a marker of resistance to the manipulation and exploitation of digital systems. The show Person of Interest, for example, starts from the premise that the government is using an AI algorithm to spy on people and to analyze their behavior in order to prevent “relevant” acts of terror, while at the same time ignoring “irrelevant” (read: individual) acts of violence. The series follows a group of people helping those identified as irrelevant, which in the context of the show is an act of resistance against the system’s algorithm; thus, whenever a cut between scenes occurs, it is clearly marked by CCTV footage and acoustic and optic digital distortion. 

As a final example, the TV series CSI: Cyber (Zuiker, Mendelsohn, and Donahue 2015-16) conflates markers of visuality and countervisuality, as the web and all things IT become painted as a hyperreal version of the criminal organizations that the regular CSI teams (in the original series and other spin-offs) battle, all while the authority forces of the FBI cyber-crime division are portrayed as resisting and claiming a right to look and reinterpret the sensory data. The use of an overlay of rolling, glowing, monochrome data onto black surfaces, the geometrics of data objects, and the digital tearing mark the ontological boundaries of digital and analog world, but at the same time obfuscate who has the power to see and interpret signs in the digital realm.

4. Conclusion

In his book What do Pictures Want?, W. J. T. Mitchell talks about the impact of images on our lives and how they engage new forms of thought. In regards to the current moment, he claims a shift in the reproduction of images, into what he calls the “age of biocybernetic reproduction”: “The convergence of genetic and computational technologies with new forms of speculative capital has turned cyberspace and biospace … into frontiers for technical innovation, appropriation, and exploitation—new forms of objecthood and territoriality for a new form of empire” (309). As Mitchell explains, “biocybernetic reproduction” is the new reality of our 21st century life-world—transformative, global, technologically and biologically hybrid, and deeply interconnected—and thus part of the discourse of critical posthumanism, in that it refers as much to the control of the digital (cyber) as it does to the chaotic resistance of the analog (bios): “Biocybernetics, then, refers not only to the field of control and communication, but to that which eludes control and refuses to communicate” (313). In my discussion of cyberpunk as negotiating questions of visuality and countervisuality in our contemporary moment then, I have shown that contemporary culture visualizes this shift towards biocybernetics by making use of cyberpunk images, by giving form to the computational power of biopolitics, to the data flows that categorize our life-world and determine who is seen and how they are seen. 

Cyberpunk allows cultural production to address shifts in visuality and sovereignty— from mobile, panoramic power over space to the biopolitics of AI’s inhuman algorithms. As the essays in Cyberpunk and Visual Culture have shown, cyberpunk is far from dead and more relevant than ever in our struggle to recognize the inescapable simulated realities that surround us and to claim moments of resistance against it. 

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faris Glaser, U of Michigan P, 1994, pp. 1-42.

Donald, James. “The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces.” Visual Culture, edited by Chris Jenks, Routledge, 2014, pp. 77-95.

Haraway, Donna J. „A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.“ Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1986, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-81. 

Herbert, James D. “Visual Culture/Visual Studies.” Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd edition, U of Chicago P, 2003, pp. 452-64.

Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Rodopi, 2003.

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992.

Mitchell, W. J. T. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. U of Chicago P, 2005.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011.

—. Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2002.

Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Polity, 2014.

Smelik, Anneke. “Cinematic Fantasies of Becoming-Cyborg.” The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture, edited by Anneke Smelik, V&R Unipress, 2010, pp. 89-104.

Ursprünglich erschienen im Band Cyberpunk and Visual Culture.

Schmeink, Lars. „Afterthoughts: Cyberpunk Engagements in Countervisuality.“ Cyberpunk and Visual Culture. Hg. Graham Murphy und Lars Schmeink. New York: Routledge, 2018. 250-65.