Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh

by Arthur Kroker, Bruce Sterling

Spasm is the 1990s. A theory-fiction about the crash world of virtual reality, from the cold sex of Madonna Mutant, the pure sex of Michael Jackson and the dead sex of Elvis to the technological fetishes of Silicon Valley. Written from the perspectives of cultural politics, music, photography, cinema and cyber-machine art, Spasm explores the ecstasy and fadeout of wired culture. Here, we suddenly find ourselves the inhabitants of a glittering, but vaguely menacing, technological galaxy where the machines finally begin to speak. Spasm is a book/CD to take along with you on your hacker journey of the electronic frontier.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Music, Politics

185 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 1993

Reviews

[Paulina ෂ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Qué lectura tan bizarra y tediosa. Es el resultado de no leer las sinopsis antes de escoger un libro... Pero ojo que a caballo regalado no se le ve el diente.

Pensé que iba a ser una novela excéntrica pero me encontré con un tratado sobre la nueva modernidad y aunque sí tuvo (muy contados) puntos interesantes (y que ahora, 30 años después de su publicación cobran más peso con el revuelo de la IA y la dependencia a redes sociales), en general me pareció una lectura insufrible en más de un sentido.

Me generó tremendo bloqueo lector, que no le voy a perdonar al autor jamás.

[Richard Southard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather obscure and certainly unique. Has some interesting ideas and has a somewhat cut-up feel with its haphazard chapters and visuals. It gets pretty repetetive with its paraphrasing over time and starts to exhaust its own character; far more theory than theory-fiction and while not exactly dense, it certainly started to feel slow.

The book also has an album pairing that it spends way too much time discussing. It is a neat project to look up on the side but the way the text tries to incorporate it by insisting on its own novelty came off very dull, and I ended up just skipping the section.

[Müslim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Crash music; therefore, for the body without organs
For flared eyes of the body telematic
For smells without a rotting skin
For neon ears without skulls