There was a time when science fiction was a different genre. There was a time, when it went without saying, that all Science Fiction heroes had blond hair and blue eyes, square jaws, and a beautiful woman to rescue. Science Fiction was little more than Middle-American, teen-boy soft porn. Those days began to fade in the 1970s, with such writers as James Tiptree Jr., Ursula K. LeGuin, Alexei Panshin, Samuel R. Delany, and a whole host of others: New Wave writers interested in issues of gender and ethnicity, class and social order as seen from below rather than above. In the early 1980s, the New Wave found itself replaced by something sleek and snazzy, and more than a little scary. The Cyberpunks arrived on the scene: and they didn’t like Buck Rogers. In 1984, Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer took the world by storm. Magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone were suddenly interested in reviewing Science Fiction, and thinking of it as a genre for adults. The Village Voice acknowledged that there was even a genre called Science Fiction, and that this genre was one to be reckoned with: Science Fiction wasn’t (these magazines realized) about things we already knew, it was about ideas, our dreams…our potential…and it was cool. It was sexy. It wasn't only about what we are, but what we could learn. I started reading (and writing) “new” Science Fiction quite seriously as a teenager, back in 1984. I read Neuromancer and the short stories set in the same “Sprawl” universe. I discovered a literary gem: “Pretty-Boy Crossover” by Pat Cadigan. Science Fiction was no longer sterile and dry, and it began to feature protagonists with skin the color of mine, or sexual orientations that were normal but NOT hetero. In short, I began to read fiction about people like me, but written by people who were not me. It was in a Science Fiction story that I first read of a male hero saying to another boy: “I love you…don’t go.” That was heady stuff in the days when AIDS was the only ‘gay’ sexual experience straight people seemed to write about. Now, jump ahead to the 1990s, and the advent of a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was a sleek and snazzy explosion of Photoshop filters and brushes. Reality—in the pages of that magazine—looked like something William Gibson wrote. Life was fast. Life was dense. Life was you surfing on the knife edge of every conceivable experience imaginable. Life felt like endless duplications of photoshop layers, each tweaked with LAYER MODE filters, each stranger than the one before though it was all the same picture. Among cyberpunks, you didn’t need drugs to get high…all you needed was your own brain. The drugs (and technology) were little more than icing on the cake, things to teach you different ways of using your own brain: things to make your own brain faster, smarter, better, bigger. I thought of that as I made this picture. It began as a perfectly normal shot of a photographer walking away from Marina City towers. It began as a normal picture with no context other than that of its creation. I was bored with it. I was thinking of Cyberpunk before it was co-opted by marketing firms. I wondered what a photographer walking away from Marina City towers would look like, cyberpunked in the old school way, and so like a bored cyberpunk, his finger endlessly clicking DUPLICATE LAYER, and tweaking the duplicates. I noticed something funny, something Cyberpunk did, back when it was snazzy and new. The more you tweak something and make it snazzy and sleek, the more it begins to resemble its primal self. In cyberpunking a digital photograph, I was amazed at how…ancient and vaguely analog it began to look. How weird is that? As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope this year is already off to a fantastic start for you.