Jacking In to Cyberpunk

Stina Attebery and Joshua Pearson explore the “Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema” exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

By Stina Attebery, Joshua PearsonJanuary 11, 2025

• SF

• Film

IT’S A TIRED JOKE by this point that we are living in a cyberpunk future—but without the mirrorshades, neon, and chrome aesthetics that might make such a future feel “cool.” The systems of surveillance, exploitation, and rampant late capitalism captured in the genre’s initial books, shows, and movies from the 1980s and ’90s are now inescapable—and uncool—aspects of everyday life. Up now (through April 12, 2026) at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, a new exhibition, Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema, explores the deeper truth behind this joke: cyberpunk is as relevant as ever, not only for navigating our increasingly dystopian world but also for addressing the ways that certain kinds of technological advancement have always come at the expense of marginalized communities.

Curated by Doris Berger, Nicholas Barlow, and Emily Rauber Rodriguez, the exhibition features a 15-minute video montage accompanied by voice-over written by award-winning director Alex Rivera from the perspective of cyberpunk, personified. It tells a story of cyberpunk film that begins with the material conditions of our technological landscape: “I was born in the coltan mines of Congo,” the voice suggests; “I was born in the high-tech factories of Tijuana.” These specific birthplaces appear in two of the films prominently featured in the exhibit—Congolese coltan mines in Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s 2021 film Neptune Frost and Tijuana factories in Rivera’s own 2008 film Sleep Dealer—and these locations capture the real material histories of computing technology itself. The politics and ethics of coltan mining are embedded in any computing device; Congolese coltan mines (and other such places where conflict minerals are extracted) are not the fictional outer space colonies of Blade Runner (1982) but real geographies of colonial power and resource control. As Sleep Dealer further demonstrates, our digital cyberworlds depend on the displacement and exploitation of globalized labor. These material birthplaces of cyberpunk ground the genre in our technological present even when characters slip into the disembodied fantasies of cyberspace.

The montage blends together clips from cyberpunk cinema, combining images from classic tentpole films like Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Strange Days (1995), and The Matrix (1999) with a diverse array of less commonly known exemplars of the genre. While the first image from the montage—a clip from Neptune Frost of one of the protagonists working in a coltan mine—matches the voice-over exactly, as the montage progresses, film clips are paired with the voice-over and with each other in interesting new combinations: for example, descriptions of hackers and outcasts accessing alternative spaces for information, intercut with Johnny the “mnemonic courier” decrypting data and Asha from Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2009) dreaming of a tree growing in the environmentally devastated landscape outside her dystopian compound. The montage presents dreaming and data mining alongside each other as similar forms of “hacking” that spur the protagonist to break away from an oppressive system—it emphasizes shared tropes and themes across cyberpunk’s extensive filmography.

This sequencing creates a nonchronological experience of cyberpunk film. Many museum exhibits and textbook accounts present a film genre linearly, starting with the genre’s early influences and precursors and ending with recent and more diverse works. Cyberpunk’s approach productively decenters canonical texts, and by extension this structure of origination, influence, and intervention. It stages a conversation between older and newer cyberpunk texts, instead of suggesting that newer cyberpunk films are simply a response to older texts. This approach emphasizes the shared political, economic, and technological systems that cyberpunk has been responding to (and predicting) since the 1980s. It cuts to the heart of what makes cyberpunk distinct from many other film genres: it is defined less by its set of filmmaking conventions and aesthetic sensibilities (though it certainly has those) than by its sustained engagement with the perpetual disruption and immiseration of digitized late capitalism.

Many diverse voices in SF filmmaking are working in nontraditional, non-Hollywood spaces, which can make showcasing their work in museums like the Academy Museum challenging. Berger, Barlow, and Rauber Rodriguez have impressively overcome these challenges, even if they couldn’t include everything they wanted. As part of a tour organized for participants of the recent Speculative Fiction Across Media conference, Berger and Barlow spoke in a Q and A about their desire to include Jeff Barnaby’s short film File Under Miscellaneous (2010) in the montage—a Mi’kmaq horror film where cultural assimilation is a painful surgical procedure. Barnaby’s work would be an excellent inclusion in the exhibition, but his recent death creates complications about the rights to showcase his film, which is currently available only in low-resolution versions online.

Another impressive challenge to which the curators rose was the physical limitation of the exhibition hall itself: a narrow, two-story gallery that doesn’t lend itself to the linear sequence of curated spaces found in many other Academy Museum exhibits. Working within these constraints helped shape Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema as an experience that deprioritizes traditional notions of canon and influence. The exhibition takes up three connected spaces, with separate entrances on a lower and upper floor. The lower entrance first takes you to a staging area that features a display of artifacts showcasing some of cyberpunk’s print influences, including a rare, signed copy of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980). The other wall is covered with film posters like a flyer-plastered alley, giving the impression that you are entering a cyberpunk street scene. This impression is bolstered by the placement of a prop phone booth from Blade Runner.

Moving past this impressive artifact, the exhibition opens into a two-story space dominated by a pair of different, simultaneously projected montages. Across the upper part of the back wall plays a looping sequence of cyberpunk cities, landscapes, and visual effects depicting the heady and disorienting experience of “jacking in” to cyberspace, all taken from a range of cyberpunk films. This atmospheric sequence creates an expansive feeling of horizon and scope inside the limited space. “I, Cyberpunk,” the montage at the heart of the exhibition, plays on a loop in an alcove set into the back of the space. The second story of the exhibition isn’t accessible from the first, so visitors need to exit the space and reenter on a small balcony where they can see artifacts (props, costumes, concept art) and overlook parts of the first floor, particularly the montage of atmospheric cyberpunk backgrounds and effects.

Verticality has been an important part of the visual aesthetic of cyberpunk going all the way back to its antecedent Metropolis (1927), communicated especially through the influence Fritz Lang’s film had on Blade Runner. The tension between the sweeping view from on high and the gritty reality of the street exemplifies the unequal divides—between “high tech and low life,” capital and labor, machine and flesh—at the heart of cyberpunk. Building this vertical divide into the embodied experience of the exhibition creates an extremely engaging interpretive effect for attendees. From the second story, the montage is out of view, even though the sound can be heard. This creates the impression that the “real spirit” of cyberpunk embodied in the film can only be fully understood “from below,” where cyberpunk’s protagonists hustle and bleed, rather than from the “top-down” perspective of titans of industry and the owners of tech capital. If anything, the connection between height, perspective, and class could have been highlighted more, perhaps by staging some litter and graffiti across the bottom floor and giving the upper story some of the damascene sheen of the Tyrell offices.

While projection allows the curators to engage with a wide range of cyberpunk films despite the constricted space, they were still constrained in the number of physical objects they could display. Thankfully, the limited quantity is more than compensated for in terms of quality. As in the film montage, the selection of props, costume pieces, and concept art manages to efficiently convey the breadth of cyberpunk film. Highlights for us included Ram’s costume from Tron (1982), a bio-port from eXistenZ (1999), and a drone prop from Night Raiders (2021). The nonchronological decentering of canon and influence is also present across some of these artifacts, although not as prominently as in the film montages. One set of artifacts in particular captured the inventive diversity of ways that cyberpunk filmmakers have envisioned bio-interface technologies, lining up devices—including the helmet from Videodrome (1983), the node injector device from Sleep Dealer, and the memory recording device from Strange Days—as a set of wearable technologies. Seeing these artifacts side by side emphasizes the imaginative range of art direction choices within cyberpunk, as even films by the same director take a very different approach to visualizing the technologies of human-computer interface.

The exhibition space is accompanied by a beautiful print catalog, which introduces cyberpunk’s history as a literary and film genre, provides the script of Rivera’s narration, and presents 23 case studies of cyberpunk films written by the exhibition’s scholarly advisory group and other contributors. These case studies combine an introduction explaining each film’s history, as well as its relevance to the genre, with screenshots, set photos, and concept art, supplementing the exhibition’s more limited space to display these kinds of behind-the-scenes artifacts. After the case studies, the book ends with a fantastic conversation between directors Danis Goulet (Night Raiders, 2013’s Wakening) and Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi, 2018’s Rafiki) on the topic of futurisms, in which they discuss the inspirations for their films and the way they approach genre as an extension of Cree and Kenyan tradition and storytelling.

There is a tension in the catalog between the holistic view of the genre offered in the exhibition itself—in which canonical works of classical cyberpunk are framed by and shot through with lesser-known films by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous directors—and the more traditional historical account, which starts with the foundational influences of the 1984 novel Neuromancer and Blade Runner and then highlights a corrective intervention by diverse voices who take cyberpunk back. Carlen Lavigne’s introduction, “The Rise of Cyberpunk in Literature and Film,” gives a thorough overview of canon and influence across the genre. Lavigne very clearly critiques the genre’s “focus on white male heroes” and suggests that “cyberpunk had to change. New voices and perspectives were being acknowledged.” But organizationally, this introduction still spends eight paragraphs talking about the history and cultural influences of mostly white, male-produced cyberpunk before finishing with two paragraphs about the overlooked and much-needed contributions of women and people of color.

This organizational scheme extends throughout much of the rest of the catalog simply because the case studies are organized chronologically, beginning with Westworld (1973) as a precursor to cyberpunk film and ending with Night Raiders. We would have liked to see the book reflect the nonchronological framing that was so striking in the museum space. For instance, Westworld and Night Raiders both play with the cyber-cowboy figure and influence from Western film tropes. These two case studies could have appeared alongside each other, perhaps placing Night Raider first, to suggest a rereading of Westworld via Indigenous cyberpunk rather than prioritizing the influence of the latter as a precursor to future works.

Placing the conversation between Kahiu and Goulet at the end of the book reinforces the impression that diverse voices and perspectives are a response to cyberpunk’s white, male history, even though Kahiu and Goulet don’t talk about early cyberpunk as an influence beyond one mention of The Matrix, which Goulet suggests could be read as a film about colonialism. These directors don’t see themselves as “new voices” who are correcting or intervening in cyberpunk’s history—they see the utility in making cyberpunk their own by reinterpreting past works through their own contributions.

At the same time, other elements of the book do capture the nonchronological spirit of the exhibition. The “I, Cyberpunk” script and the conversation about futurisms offer different ways of defining the genre holistically, and there is rhetorical power in giving Kahiu and Goulet the final word. In addition to this, the power of the lavish two-page spreads of images from cyberpunk film history that are interspersed throughout the volume cannot be understated. For example, one spread arranges shots of the factory from Sleep Dealer, Flynn’s splayed and dematerializing body in Tron, and the nightmarish amalgamation of human and machine in Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) alongside each other, capturing cyberpunk’s fascination with the body horror of cybernetic connection. In addition to making the volume a stunning coffee-table book, these beautifully staged juxtapositions recreate the sense of holism and interconnection generated by the visual rhetoric of the exhibition’s film montage.

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema offers a fascinating, creative perspective on both the history and the future of the genre. If you are in Los Angeles, we highly recommend checking it out. We also found the catalog to be both beautiful and useful in itself, and we think it would be of interest to those who love cyberpunk film, whether they attend the exhibition in person or not.

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Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema runs from October 6, 2024, to April 12, 2026, at the Academy Museum.