Sunday, February 12, 2006

Supermodern: Beyond Cyberpunk?

I've been re-reading my copies of Warren Ellis' cool newer comic, Desolation Jones, and checking his website about it. In a post on there that was his author's commentary on issue one he mentioned an interesting term that I've been nosing around on the internet for more information about: supermodern.

Just the sound of it is interesting. So, I've Googled and gone through the internet archive (not with a lot of luck...but I didn't find a few sites with some interesting IDM stuff). While I can't find the original PDF, not can I find an archive of it either :( I did find a thesis by Adam Montandon about supermodern. Here's the abstract:
As access to global communications technologies such as the internet increases, so too does speculation about life inside of electronic volume. Free from the constraints and boundaries of physicality, many provisional attempts have been made to create spaces without boundaries. However the entanglement of the mind within the body has created a culture that has chiefly experienced only partial immersion in virtual reality, the mind goes where the body cannot follow. This in turn leads to a new architectural sensibility based on reducing physicality in architecture, in order to give the body the same freedom in physical space as the mind has enjoyed in virtual space.

A new architecture of the physical is born from experience in the electronic. An architecture that encompasses a digital, networked, global, transient and virtual mindset. It appears that we are not, as one may expect, building virtual architecture inside computers, but instead are creating cyberspace on earth. This new architecture is the inverse of Postmodernism. This is Supermodern.

While I couldn't find the PDF, Google does have an html cache of the thesis here.

Now, I haven't read and digested all of this article yet I do think that it suggests some interesting ideas for cyberpunk (and even "regular" modern gaming) as it goes in directions that gamers would not normally think to go into.

What do people think, and better yet...what can we build out of these ideas to use in our own campaigns or settings?