Changes

 

 

 

Felicity J. Colman

Felicity J. Colman

The proto cyber-consciousness of the Buffybot, like the dialogue of Buffyspeak (Buffy Speak 101, 2003), provides BtVS with the comedic variation common to serials. This is relief in the tense action world of the buffyverse; seriality displaying a rhizomatic system that accommodates the aleatory nature of the world it inhabits. However, BtVS’s concept of a redeemable human soul living on beyond its physical vessel ultimately maintains capital’s utilization of the narratives of guilt, punishment, faith, and redemption. The aesthetics of Buffy and the Buffybot’s bodies, like the clones of Star Wars, involve pre-programmed sensory/emotive features, ensuring the continuity of Manichean systems of truth.

The proto cyber-consciousness of the Buffybot, like the dialogue of Buffyspeak (Buffy Speak 101, 2003), provides BtVS with the comedic variation common to serials. This is relief in the tense action world of the buffyverse; seriality displaying a rhizomatic system that accommodates the aleatory nature of the world it inhabits. However, BtVS’s concept of a redeemable human soul living on beyond its physical vessel ultimately maintains capital’s utilization of the narratives of guilt, punishment, faith, and redemption. The aesthetics of Buffy and the Buffybot’s bodies, like the clones of Star Wars, involve pre-programmed sensory/emotive features, ensuring the continuity of Manichean systems of truth.

==3. Iwakra Lain: Cybergothic-regionalism, intimacy-animation.==

==3. Iwakura Lain: Cybergothic-regionalism, intimacy-animation.==

Serial Experiments: Lain (Lain)’s text explores the link between consciousness and the life of that consciousness once it becomes ‘wired’, that is, connected to and part of the internet’s hyperworld. Lain and BtVS are both culturally specific texts, but they share the implicit analogy of the traumatic alterity of the teen-body. Lain’s storyline commences with the suicide of a fellow classmate (Layer 1: “Navi”). Lain is concerned to find out why this 13 year old school girl committed suicide, so that she may enter the electronic universe. Lain is able to find this out, as the dead girl’s ‘energy’, expunged of its physical form has been able to continue without the need for a physical body, and utilises instead the cyberworld, where consciousness is ‘free’. Lain also finds that she is able to transmit her energy into ‘the wired’, and starts communicating on a mass scale, to friends, and strangers within her community, and by implication, the world. The series ends with the message that ‘we are all connected’, and have no need for our corporeal bodies (Layer 12: “Landscape”; Layer 13: “Ego”).

Serial Experiments: Lain (Lain)’s text explores the link between consciousness and the life of that consciousness once it becomes ‘wired’, that is, connected to and part of the internet’s hyperworld. Lain and BtVS are both culturally specific texts, but they share the implicit analogy of the traumatic alterity of the teen-body. Lain’s storyline commences with the suicide of a fellow classmate (Layer 1: “Navi”). Lain is concerned to find out why this 13 year old school girl committed suicide, so that she may enter the electronic universe. Lain is able to find this out, as the dead girl’s ‘energy’, expunged of its physical form has been able to continue without the need for a physical body, and utilises instead the cyberworld, where consciousness is ‘free’. Lain also finds that she is able to transmit her energy into ‘the wired’, and starts communicating on a mass scale, to friends, and strangers within her community, and by implication, the world. The series ends with the message that ‘we are all connected’, and have no need for our corporeal bodies (Layer 12: “Landscape”; Layer 13: “Ego”).