Duchamp in Neuromancer
Feb. 23rd, 2003 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFrom an E-mail I sent to a professor of mine:
I thought that it might interest you, given your interest in modernist culture, to know that Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise á nu par ses célibataires, même has made at least one appearance in science fiction, in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Neuromancer is the prototype cyberpunk novel, exploring a time when information technology has become ubiquitous in the context of a general technological blossoming yet conditions worldwide (environmental, political, social) have degraded sharply as a result of fierce competition between all manners of agencies (state, business, secret). The plot is set around the Tessier-Ashpool corporation--run by a secretive, technophilic, and profoundly decadent family--and its space station, which houses an emergent artificial intelligence. The protagonist, Case, is on a spaceship nearby, watching through his lover/co-worker Molly's eyes (literally; cybernetic relays) as she moves through the station. Duchamp's work makes its appearance on page 207 of the 10th anniversary (1994) Ace edition:
"[Molly] had passed many things that case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eys, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled--her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically--"La mariée mise á nu par ses célibataires, même." She'd reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clocking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass."
Just for your curiosity's sake.
I thought that it might interest you, given your interest in modernist culture, to know that Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise á nu par ses célibataires, même has made at least one appearance in science fiction, in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Neuromancer is the prototype cyberpunk novel, exploring a time when information technology has become ubiquitous in the context of a general technological blossoming yet conditions worldwide (environmental, political, social) have degraded sharply as a result of fierce competition between all manners of agencies (state, business, secret). The plot is set around the Tessier-Ashpool corporation--run by a secretive, technophilic, and profoundly decadent family--and its space station, which houses an emergent artificial intelligence. The protagonist, Case, is on a spaceship nearby, watching through his lover/co-worker Molly's eyes (literally; cybernetic relays) as she moves through the station. Duchamp's work makes its appearance on page 207 of the 10th anniversary (1994) Ace edition:
"[Molly] had passed many things that case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eys, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled--her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically--"La mariée mise á nu par ses célibataires, même." She'd reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clocking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass."
Just for your curiosity's sake.
