Before Snowcrash, before Ghost in the Shell

May 2, 2016 10:04 AM

There was 1990's Cyberpunk documentary (SLYT)
posted by I-baLL (25 comments total)

If the video is blocked in your region or you just can't see it for whatever reason then here it is on archive.org :

https://archive.org/details/cyberpunk_201410
posted by I-baLL at 10:07 AM on May 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

More about the documentary (which has a lot of Timothey Leary and William Gibson) is here, where they point out the amazing quote that cyberpunk was "high tech for low life"

There is also "No Maps for These Territories" from 2000.
posted by blahblahblah at 10:12 AM on May 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is like peak '90s.*

I don't want to watch it alone. Like a fine wine, I want to share this with friends. They're going to get sick of me criticizing the production quality really quickly.

*Excluding pop stars.
posted by Sphinx at 10:13 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

"*Excluding pop stars."

...before Billy Idol.....
posted by I-baLL at 10:18 AM on May 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Information wants to be free.
posted by enamon at 10:19 AM on May 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." - L. P. Hartley
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:24 AM on May 2, 2016

Fans of this old new æsthetic may also enjoy Lawnmower Man: just the CGI. From 1992, and one of the better Hollywood imaginings of cyberspace made. The graphics have aged poorly but the design is still really strong and distinctive, particularly the final boss battle.
posted by Nelson at 10:44 AM on May 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Lawnmower Man: Just the CGI reminds me of Heston of the Apes.
posted by xedrik at 10:49 AM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ghost in the Shell slightly edges this out. The manga was first published in serial format in 1989.
posted by Sangermaine at 11:22 AM on May 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, good point. I was going to use the "oh, I'm only talking about video mediums" cop-out but then you could say "But you mentioned Snow Crash which is a novel" and then I'd have to say "Uh, man, maybe it's a novel for you." And then you'd think "What does that even mean?" but by then I'd have slowly backed out of the conversation.
posted by I-baLL at 11:28 AM on May 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm guessing these effects are first generation Video Toaster.

It hurts so good.
posted by drwicked at 11:34 AM on May 2, 2016

This is all one in my memories with 2400bps modems, my first 386 PC (which could run Fractint really really quickly!), and the Mirrorshades anthology. On the one hand, I still had a dot-matrix printer: on the other, I was swapping osychedelic art with someone in Wisconsin. And I could buy Voyager mission data on CDs.
posted by Devonian at 12:26 PM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

> the Mirrorshades anthology

That was the first thing I thought of when I started watching. I loved that book, but it's probably best that I not re-read it to see how it's held up.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:53 PM on May 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ghost in the Shell slightly edges this out. The manga was first published in serial format in 1989.

And there's Akira too. 1982-1990 manga, 1988 movie.
posted by sukeban at 2:23 PM on May 2, 2016

...yeah ok, now I see that they've got plenty of Akira in the documentary.
posted by sukeban at 2:29 PM on May 2, 2016

I can't stop laughing at the demon and robot "masks" concealing the guys's faces starting around 7:45. Every video chat program needs that option.

This video is a treasure trove of graphics, sounds, and music.
posted by Sangermaine at 3:59 PM on May 2, 2016

Today I learned Front 242 is still an active act.

Nostalgia fix Front 242 Headhunter.

Yeah you used to be a bad assss.
posted by bukvich at 5:53 PM on May 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Also, Previously.
posted by Metro Gnome at 6:30 PM on May 2, 2016

I was 11. This documentary blew my mind. I knew cyberpunk was a thing - I'd just read, in a deeply confused way, Count Zero - but it never occurred to me that it was a culture, even in the loosely defined, buzzy way of this documentary. Its easy to be cynical now, but I was a kid from country Victoria, alone and alienated after moving to suburban Melbourne, and this precise moment in time, along with Gibson and Stephenson and Rudy Rucker and Pat Cadigan, plus a highly educational dose of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius mindfuckery, was utterly formational.

Oh, and FASA roleplaying games, and weird BBS culture. I miss that energy, when everything in the world was just beyond my fingertips and i had to strive to get it...
posted by prismatic7 at 6:39 PM on May 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

I have a clean copy of Wired 1.1 on a bookshelf somewhere. Pre-web. It's bizarre to read now.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:40 PM on May 2, 2016

If you like this, you will love the collection of Mondo 2000 covers.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:06 PM on May 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Is it just me or is William Gibson who Harry Potter grew up to be?
posted by Mike Mongo at 9:57 PM on May 2, 2016

I saw this at the cinema when it came out, and I have a flyer from the film. I think it followed me discovering Shadowrun and by the time Johnny Mnemonic came out I knew cyberpunk (and I knew people who called themselves cyberpunks without irony, and I suppose they were, because they were post-punks on BBSes, all while listening to PWEI and Frontline Assembly and reading Burroughs and Gibson and Ballard) ... cyperpunk was played out, but in those basically pre-wired days, gosh, how revolutionary was cyberpunk?

I miss that energy, when everything in the world was just beyond my fingertips and i had to strive to get it...

Me too. The Internet has made everything easy. Except finding arseholes everywhere.
posted by Mezentian at 3:27 AM on May 3, 2016

Presumably there are still exciting new things like that are just beyond my fingertips, but I'm no longer cool enough to know about it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:55 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

"I saw this at the cinema when it came out, and I have a flyer from the film. "

holy crap, can you scan it in?
posted by I-baLL at 10:21 AM on May 3, 2016