The Liquid Electric: Tracing Nature’s Machine Code

Abstract

Representations of techno-ecologies have a deep and evocative history embedded as they are within our most elaborate cultural fantasies and our most extreme scientific simulations. These digital media dreamscapes constitute the foundation principles of an emergent data aesthetics of liquid. Hollywood has codified this through an art director’s pallet that is often blue and luminous in tone, is found at the core of a film’s novum and often takes on a kinetic electrical form. It is as if these digital signposts - from Disney’s 1982 film Tron through to more recent ecological parables such as A.I., Gravity and Prometheus – recognize the very gothic anxiety we hold for our environment in the twe..