Reading Response 2: Technology and Ethnic Otherness

  Ghost in the Shell (1995) In his article “Technology and (Chinese) Ethnicity”, Darrell William Davis asks this question: why has Chinatown become an essential visual motif for dystopic future in cyberpunk classics such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell (1995)?   A simple (yet valid) explanation would be Orientalism, or the use of the East as a signifier of “other”. To represent the mysterious and unknown future, a future that seems so “alien” to us, films have to employ the visual strategy of “otherness” to create a defamiliarizing effect. This otherness could be gendered, as there are

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[Reading Response II] Moving Cities

In the piece ‘Migratory Cities’ by Carl Abbott, the author proposes the questions “what if a city could move?” and “what is gained and what is lost when a city pulls up stakes?” This raises the issue of what purpose a city has, which led me to think about what defines a city: is it the land it lies on? Or is it the inhabitants that make the state? I think that though we can distinguish cities from others by determining the piece of land it has, a city is defined through its people and their ways of living. It

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City in the Future

The reading, “Migratory Cities”, is about some examples of moveable cities imagined by writers, urban planners and architects in the past. It is quite inspiring and interesting of how futurists imagined about an innovative city which could be transformed from the ground to a moveable machine. It has reminded me that the first time I had seen a similar idea from a Japanese Anime, Howl’s Moving Castle, by Hayao Miyazaki when I was little. The Moving Castle is similar to the design by Ron Herron. However, the Walking City carries a society inside the megastructure and the moving castle is

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