Class work: Neuromancer chapter 8

How is Zion defined by the narrative in chapter 8? 

"Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started building. They'd suffered calcium loss and art shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates laserscrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders" (99).

What aspects of the city do we learn about? Make a list of the city's geographical and ageographical features.

-Shifts from Istanbul to Paris. 

-Japan Air Lines shuttle

-Orbital Station called "Freeside" 

-Ethiopia

-Rastafarianism- making them age rapidly

-Babylon

-there's no gravity (Case and Molly are sent there to learn zero gravity skills without gravity)  

-"secret" bank accounts with illegal transactions

-religious place (holy land) -> Zionites -> jah (God), ganja (marijuana), dub (spindle music ... techno and drugs)

-30 years old

-organization -> founders-elders, "The two surviving founders ........" (107)

geographical
-taxi
-30 years old
ageographical 
-holograms of shops, buildings, etc

Pay attention to the physical, culture, and organizational dimensions of the city.

Physical: Visual, How its built, How people move through it, Interactions between body, Spacial and temporal, relationships between physical object and people

Culture: Sensations- smell, Embodiment, beliefs, traditions, narratives, values, assumptions, desires, expectations, personal bios

Organizational Dimensions: laws, government, clubs, communities 

Riviera: drug addict, makes hallucination happen to people, with Armitage, recruited to be in a team with Armitage

Group Work: Mapping Chiba City

Ageographical

-expect what it would be in a city like people, buildings, technology, space but has different idea of a city like the difference in doctor building to a scary area next to it.
-warehouse, alleyways
-Chiba City ->technology and good places of doctors and clinics but wary and filled with bad guys like theirs, killers, drug dealers
-Matrix -> where your conscious go to search for certain things
-making invisible to visible of mapping out the place (behind bars)
-foreigner crowds (people from other places -international)
-westernized culture
-English name stores
-international aspect of the city
-tracing illegal people will help trace down where Case needs to get to in Chiba City like the Illegal Movement
-trace down paper money "new yen"
-little money doesn't discriminate
-tracing down passers/ illegal people in the city
-particular view of the city

Neuromancer Part 2 summary

No class Mon Oct. 31

notes:
-Left Chiba City (travel)
-Surgery Case is able to "Jack in" to Matrix
-"Booty Traps" in Case's body- threat of losing that ability to hack
-Case can't metabolize drugs
-connects through Molly's body-able to access consciousness when she needs Panther Modern

In groups, outline the plot, as it's advanced in Part 2, " The Shopping Expedition."
-Molly and Case left Chiba City
- Case follows Molly to see her boss, Armitage.
-Armitage wants Case's hacking skill
-Case declines but Armitage told him that he he fixed Case with remember how to hack but if he doesn't work for him, the sac (mycotoxin) that was attached to his blood vessels will dissolve and affect him to like he once was before. This could be some "lie" but Case takes the opportunity.
-injected endorphin inhibitors -ending his addiction to drugs
-Scream Fist, the team that Armitage is in and who's behind the scene
-Molly sends in the group Panther Moderns to spy on Armitage about his background and who he is working for
-Meets Larry, Molly's Friend, a computer technician who doesn't really seem to like Molly hanging with Case.

Pick a section from part 2 that you find amusing.

`How you doing. Case?' He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply. Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating. The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright. He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward... Her destination was one of the dubious software rental com- plexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white card- board. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.

`Larry, you in, man?' She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail. `Hey, Larry.' `Molly.' He nodded. `I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.' Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed. `Molly's got a rider,' he said, `and Larry doesn't like that.' `Hey,' she said, `I didn't know you were so... sensitive. I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.' `I know you, lady?' The blank look returned. `You looking to buy some softs?' `I'm looking for the Moderns.' `You got a rider, Molly. This says.' He tapped the black splinter. `Somebody else using your eyes.' `My partner.' `Tell your partner to go.' `Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.' `What are you talking about, lady?' `Case, you take off,' she said, and he hit the switch, in- stantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cy- berspace. `Panther Moderns,' he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. `Five minute précis.'

-the foreignness of of her body language
-getting closer to her with understanding her feelings and her life
-memory lane -no meaning to it -a place with antiquated history -aspect of the past
-externalization of the concept
-antiquated
-"the link was one way" (56)
-"passivity" (57)
-"Embodiment"
-Molly kind of knew? that Case was inside of her
-first experience in the book to know what Cyberspace is

In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective di- mension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen- dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands.

-its the limit of the matrix
-can be wherever you want to be
-limitless gulfs of nothingness

Mapping Chiba City of Neuromancer

Look at the first section of the book: "Chiba City Blues." What information are we given about the city: Is its representation ageographical or geographical? What do we learn about its culture? Inhabitants? Institutions? Space? Borders? What are the most significant aspects of Chiba City, according to the narrative of the first section? What are the major differences between Chiba City as a fictional construct,
and our own world?

Chiba City is a city in Japan and not that far away from Tokyo. In chapter one of Neuromancer, Chiba City sounds as if its representation is geographical. It is not an unknown place on the map and the real world because it can be pointed out. The names (like Ninsei, Chatsubo, Chiba, etc.) they placed in the book are actual places of Japan; and the people and the area that are described in the book seems the same as how it is described in the real world. Chiba City in the book is like an abandon city where it was just found and that the people living in Chiba City is filled with low life beings that are homeless, burglars, hustlers, druggies and drug dealers, etc. The aura of the city is dark and saddening where "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (Gibson).
While searching through the Internet about the real Chiba City, the city has become government designated base. Like how the book described it, Chiba City is developing a technology called "Cyberspace" or the "Matrix" which is a computerized program that manipulates the digital world.  They built technologies that aren't really spread out to the outer world but to themselves. Chiba City is like their hidden underground base to make those technologies. The city is historical and old but it still wasn't deleted from the world."There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its in- habitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself." (Gibson).
In chapter one, the characters do whatever they want in Chiba City. They left humanity behind and went against the world. They do whatever they want by killing people to get their money, they sleep wherever they want, they eat whatever they find to survive, etc. But these characters have something that we don't expect now but maybe in the future of the real world. They are implanted with technology in their living parts. Like Ratz, he has mechanical teethes that could probably break through anything he bites on. There are robberies and deaths . There are dirty trashes laying around in the city (sounds like NYC). The protagonist, Case, is described in a way of an anti-hero. He is a hustler, a thief, a druggie, etc. He has a mind set of wanting the cyberspace that he once used to remember how to hack into the program and get the details of it. But because of stealing from one of his employers, his central nervous system of cyberspace was erased with mycotoxin. But he tries to find his way back to get a cure to remember cyberspace, his life.  His lifestyle shows the future or what Gibson wants us to understand what's going to happen in the future.

Geographical

Ageographical

Life in the Meta City -Chapter 1: Chiba City Blues

Cyberpunk- a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life" 

Science Fiction- genre of fiction dealing with the impact of imagined innovations in science or technology, often in a futuristic setting.

This story takes place in Chiba City, Japan, during a historical time of the future. But as it being a science fiction, the story turns out as Japan --they would do anything to stop those that gets in the way-- creating a new generation of technologies that other countries have never noticed or developed called the Cyberspace or the Matrix. It is a computer access that manipulates the digital world. Case is the protagonist of the story. He was 24-years-old throughout the story, but when he was twenty-two, he used to be a cyberspace cowboy, a rustler, or a talented illegal computer hacker. He was caught stealing from his employees so for his punishment, he was "trapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective." His central nervous system was damaged with mycotoxin so he won't be allowed to remember or be able to use his intelligence anymore to hack into the computer or his addiction, the cyberspace. He was one of the few peoples that had the skills to be able to get any data on any system of the matrix and operate any changes to it. But because of his wrong doing of what he promised that he wouldn't break, he lost everything that he only wanted. He tries to look for a cure so he can go back into cyberspace and live his dream on that. After his nervous system was damaged, he lived his life miserably, poorly, suicidally, and a drug addict. But after realizing that he can't give up on Cyberspace, he goes around searching for the cure. He goes to a bar called the Chatsubo that's owned by Ratz. Ratz has some skills where he can break almost anything with his bare hands. While he goes searching around, he looks for a girl named Linda which he met before at an arcade. But while searching for her, he bumps into Molly who in the end of the chapter, said that she needs Case.

The ideas from the essay provides a context for reading the novel by telling the readers more depths of the story on what the person who's writing the context thinks of the story. It helps the readers understand more in easier terms of the story if they have a harder time reading it on their own. Like for me, I surfed through the Internet looking for the meaning of the words and some phrases that I didn't understand in the chapter.

This chapter confused me very much. There were terms that was hard to understand which I kept looking up on online to see what the romanized Japanese words meant. There were quite a lot of Japanese terms used in this chapter. There are also scientific terms that I never heard of before which I tried to ride it in the text for more meaning to it but because the text was all over the place, Internet helped me a lot to understand the chapter. Also there were phrases that confused which I'm not sure how to explain it. There are also shifts in sentences where there's a topic on one place and changes to another and goes back to it which confuses me on where I'm at.

In Gibson's essay "Life in the Meta City", he talks about his definition of a city by "choice", "ageographical", and "Disneyland".  In a city "you never know whom you might meet.. In a small town, you're less lively to encounter people or things or situations you haven't encountered previously" (88). This tells the reader about one part of life in any city that could happen to anyone. You might see the same people almost every single day in a country or somewhere small that you grew up in. But in a city, you might meet a random celebrity walking around for just that night, you might encounter someone you've never met before asking for help, or you might never be able to find people you know unless you made an actual appointment to meet up with them.

Gibson talks about what he believes in what a city is: why it's a city and how it's actually a city (the concept of the city). He talks about his choice of the city on how there are more choices then small towns or places that isn't a city. The city is a place where there's a choice to change it: it's like a 'chance'. You can change parts of the city by adding another building, changing the name of a company, taking out the building, closing down the company, etc. But like Disneyland or London's Eiffel Tower, they can't change it. It's already an expected place.

In the city, you have more "choices", a chance. They would have a lot more choices then small towns. You can do whatever you want in the city, live however the way you want, and be at their "experientially richest" (89).  

Cities are reduced in choice by Disneylanding themselves. It will become too perfect, there will be no more growth, and there will be a reduction of choice. But the visitors are expecting certain disneyfication in the city.but "of every Disneyland: you can't repurpose a theme park" (88). 

There's some way we inhabit the city. No matter where you go you map out where you were at before and remember where you traveled around in the city as if you lived there before. The city can be "ageographical and largely unrecongnized meta city that is the Internet" (89). 

In Class: 

1. What does Gibson mean when he says "cities scan be at their experiential richest during periods of relative disjunction" (89)?
Experience of artists, storytelling, inspiration, (if the city isn't perfect there's always a way to create new buildings, places, fun), low rent, minimal policing (graffiti art around places unexpected).

2. What, according to Gibson is the "risk of Disneylanding" that threatens the life of a city?
Eliminates any possibility for anything else -makes it boring, corporate city, single ownership, over control, reduction of choice, permanent- static vision according to a specific time. The city has to be retro-fitted, not open-ended, got to change all the time.

3. What does Gibson mean when he says "the future of cities will consist of two different modalities combined within the geographical and largely unrecognized meta city that is the Internet" (89)?
         Two Different incarnation -Anarchy of Choice and Disneyfied

Ageographical/Metacity -mapped and experienced through Internet

                                 -Hopstop

                                 -DishFinder

                                 -GPS

                                 -Yelp

International Commerce
Local News

4. How do your answers to these questions frame your reading of Neuromancer?
Concerning of the city and the future of the city. The explanation in the story helps the reader map out what Chiba City might look like and the protagonist to find his destination.

Exploring the Ordinary

Exploring the Ordinary

Everyone wonders what’s really going on to the everyday. Are the objects there, who are we talking to, what are we talking to, are they really there, why is it there, when was it there, why are we talking to it, is it listening to us, can it talk to us, will it respond back, do they show emotions, is it touchable, has it always been there, where did it come from, what can we do with it, does it age like us, can it be human, can they save us, is it important to us, “How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?” (Perec). These are few of the questions one asks themselves while they realize what they have been doing unconsciously. It’s quite a surprising shock on how this all happens without us really noticing. Like for me, laptop is my everyday and after consciously thinking about what’s going on between my laptop and me, there was no end to the questions and answers and questioning it “seems to have ceased forever to astonish us” (Perec).

During my nineteen years of living, I’ve had about four laptops and eight desktops, which sounds like a lot but I keep wanting for a new generation each year.  PC to laptop from laptop to PC every two to three years was my obsession with computers. But out of all computer used basis, laptops are my favorite. They come in several colors, different designs, large screens, small screens, imported webcam, no webcam, heavy, light, thick, thin, high speed internet, low speed internet, cheap ones, expensive ones, free applications, no applications. I have two laptops with me all the time. One laptop is used for fun and the other is used for schoolwork. The laptop that I use for fun is my Dell Studio that has been used for three years back home in Pennsylvania and now here with me in Brooklyn, NYC. My other laptop is brand new this year of 2011 and bought for my art college, Pratt Institute. It is the 15 inches MacBook Pro.

In my Dell Studio laptop, there are bookmarks of sites that I enjoy exploring. There’s Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, Google, eBay, mypratt, Amtrak, Megabus, 1channel.ch, Gmarket, Narutoget.com, Hulu, Yahoo, Hotmail, hey!korean, dramacrazy, Express (my all time favorite clothing store), Forever21, American Eagle, Steve Madden, Viki, and MySoju. There are even repeats of the websites like YouTube videos bookmarked with my favorite video blogs like Niga Higa, music videos, Korean actors and singers talking, amazing dance videos, Korean music bank, America Got Talent, anime trailers, movie trailers, American celebrities, and so much more. My computer is filed with many applications as well such as Skype, Msn, Aim, ooVoo, ViikiiDesktop, eBay, iTunes, Veoh Web Player, QuickTime Player, etc. There is only one imported program and that is the Microsoft Office 2007. The rest are downloads from the Internet, which I probably have wasted all the capacity that the laptop could hold.

My Dell Studio is getting pretty old because it’s been with me for more then three years. It’s always been with me at home on my bed, the kitchen table, the furniture, the basement, the outside field, and my work desk; it’s been with me at my friend’s place, my cousin’s place, my high school, Pratt Institutes studios and dorm room, cars, buses, trains, airplanes, nature, and my apartment. Now it’s a lot slower then it was when I first got it. There are tons of evil viruses eating up my computer, which I booted it many times throughout the years. The battery for this laptop died due to accidental drops and damages to the laptop so I have to stay in one location that’s near an outlet for my laptop battery plug.

In my MacBook Pro, my friend helped me download the Adobe Application that is filed with Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and many other Adobe programs. These programs were needed for my Graphic Design major. Laptops have there own ways to download programs for free online. It’s a waste of money to go out and buy $300 Adobe programs if you could download applications that you need for anything on the Internet. For example, I have Microsoft Word imported in my Mac laptop from using the disk that my friend already has instead of going out to Best Buy or the Pratt Store to buy myself the program. I don’t have as many bookmarks as my Dell Laptop, but I do have favorites and important school information saved onto it such as Facebook, YouTube, mypratt, The Living City: Reading and Writing the Everyday, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, Amtrak and Megabus. After receiving this new MacBook Pro, I went online on eBay and Amazon and bought myself a creamy royal green laptop case, a light pink keyboard cover, and a sheet of cute Korean letters sticker to protect and decorate my laptop. I’m still new with MacBook Pro so when it comes to just fishing through the Internet for fun, I just my Dell laptop.

My laptops are my first friends to touch and say hello to whenever I come home from school or other places. Whenever I come home, I run upstairs to my laptops and go online and check out my Facebook to see if anyone commented on my wall or my pictures, I check if there were any new videos that’s been uploaded on YouTube, and I check my e-mails to see if I got any neat coupons for shopping. I get on Skype to see if anyone I like is on and wants to video chat with me, I check my msn and talk to my cousin’s from Korea and see if they are still awake to be able to chat with me, I Facebook stalk my friends to see if there are any cute guys that they are friends with. I turn on my Dell laptop and turn on a movie on 1channel.ch and do my Graphic design homework on my MacBook Pro. This is the easiest way for me to stay up and concentrate to do my homework.

I tend to yell at my laptop without me realizing that it won’t speak back. Facebook has this game called Go Go! Matgo, a Korean gambling game. It’s a game where you play against another Facebook user and gamble with fake online money by playing cards. When I’m not focused on the game, I end up losing a lot of money and when that happens, I start to yell out of nowhere at my laptop. I even type harder on the keyboard that makes loud typing noises. This seems to annoy my roommate a lot but she does the same thing too to her laptop when she loses playing Facebook Tetris. After we both finish yelling at our laptops and damaging it a little bit, we start to laugh because we realized that we are yelling at an inanimate object.

Whenever I’m home and slacking off, I tend to stare at my laptops for hours doing nothing but just staring and staring at the screen waiting for some type of chat box or a notification to pop up. Seconds, minutes, and hours passes by but I start to realize how much of the time that I’m wasting staying home just staring at my laptops. “We live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers” (Perec). We don’t think towards our actions because we just do it: it just happens. Then I begin to regret being like this but it just seems to happen unconsciously. But, laptops are always there to help me out. They can be geniuses and they make me smarter then just learning in class. They make me who I want to be which is a better active person who studies and understands what’s going on in the world by searching the news and learning new ideas on the laptops. My laptops are my life, my savior, my listener, my addiction, my other half, my everyday.