Artificial Culture

Artificial Culture is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, especially science fiction films and novels. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationship between people, our bodies, and technology at large. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which we as a culture can measure what it means to be human. Science fiction feature films and novels, and other related media, frequently and provocatively deploy ideas of the artificial in ways which the lines between people, our bodies, spaces and culture more broadly blur and, at times, dissolve.

Building on the rich foundational work on the figures of the cyborg and posthuman, this book situates the artificial in similar terms, but from a nevertheless distinctly different viewpoint. After examining ideas of the artificial as deployed in film, novels and other digital contexts, this study concludes that we are now part of an artificial culture entailing a matrix which, rather than separating minds and bodies, or humanity and the digital, reinforces the symbiotic connection between identities, bodies, and technologies.

Spider-Man and his everyman alter ego Peter Parker have always lived in New York City, albeit an alternate New York situated within the Marvel comic book universe. The trilogy of Spider-Man feature films are also set in New York, although it is neither an historically accurate representation, nor the comic book version, but a third cityscape which imaginatively borrows and builds on both of these precursors. This chapter argues that within that context, the Spider-Man films enact a form of artificial mourning, acting as a popular cultural arena in which some of the immediate tensions and traumas of the post-September 11th Western world are articulated and explored. From the outset, it is important to flag that the term artificial mourning is not necessarily positioning mourning facilitated through popular culture as ‘unreal’ or necessarily ‘less’ than trauma in the ‘real’ world. Rather, the ‘artificial’ in this term is consistent with deploying the artificial not as a marker of the unreal, but rather as a signifier of unstable boundaries, where easy binary divisions no longer make sense. Moreover, the artificial tends to highlight areas where technology, mediation and humanity intersect in unsettling ways, evident in the much-feared but seeming oxymoron of artificial intelligence. In terms of Spider-Man as character, franchise and cultural icon, his artificiality is evident in the seeming incompatibilities of being both a human subject and a technological object, being both a hero and an everyday person with everyday problems, and being both a means of escapism for audiences, while engaging on some level with serious political and cultural concerns. Moreover, the movies situate Spider-Man and his various nemeses as artificial people – in that they are products of substantial technological transformation, whether purposefully or accidental – set in a New York largely facilitated by cutting edge special effects. This chapter begins by establishing some of the important connections between Spider-Man and New York from the more than 30 years of comic book history, then focuses on the influence of September 11th 2001 on both the comics and the feature films, before explicating some of the most important ways artificial mourning is played out in those films, concluding that the Spider-Man trilogy allegorically functions as a significant cultural arena in which aspects of the Western world’s ‘Long September’ have been explored.