DIGITAL NIGHTMARE_
Modernity sits perched between unrealities, straddling the uncomfortable divide between circuitry and synapse, between the tangible and the imagined. In our first anniversary issue, we cast our viewpoint back into the binary nothingness of cyberpunk's half-realized future.
SIFTING THROUGH THE FUTURE-PRESENT
BY KOLA HEYWARD-ROTIMI — To live in our contemporary era is to live thinking of a future in decay. How can anything normal, anything of the status quo, be maintained when every week brings an event (or a catastrophe) that was supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime?
RECENT ARTICLES_
FEATURES_
The tribulations of the physical have rendered us digital nomads—adrift in spirit, body, and soul. We become weapons, tools, machinery, faceless extrusions of a vast system from which we cannot escape, only transcend. This month, we seek redemption the only place we can: here, in the radiant darkness.
NOWHERE_ HERE
BY KURT SCHILLER — Forty years ago, a group of cyberneticists, techno-utopians, and Marxist radicals sought to create a realm of imagined communities brought forth from the desert of pure data. Today, cyberspace withers and dies—and all that's left is pure capitalism.
FIGHT ON, YOU CYBERPUNK_
GUEST CURATOR — JESS LEVINE.
As a genre, synthwave fits naturally into the mold of both the storytelling “concept album” and the instrumental album. Synthwave and its brethren are love letters to the soundtracks of the 80s cyberpunk movies from which the musical genres emerged—Vangelis’s classic score to Blade Runner (1982), John Carpenter’s accompaniment to Escape from New York (1981), and the like. Its origins as a pastiche of movie scores allows cyberpunk music to tell its stories by referencing the sonic and musical tropes employed in these scores—sometimes taking it even further through the incorporation of foley.
THE FLESH REVOLTS
BY MEABH CADIGAN
THE HEGELIAN EMPTINESS OF CYBERPUNK 2077
BY LAPO LAPPIN
SPECIAL THANKS
A very special thank-you to our backers and contributors for supporting us through our first 12 issues. Without you, Blood Knife couldn't exist.
GHOST IN THE SHELL: THE HORROR OF MASS PRODUCTION
BY NICOLA KAPRON
FEAR OF A BLACK MIRROR
BY MICHAEL TRIGILIO