Hackcity – Hackbodies. Images and Narratives of Cyborg Architectures in Japanese Anime and Urban Utopias

The images of the hyper-technological cities in Japanese anime are examples of premediation of the relationship between humanity, media-city, and environmental degradation. Especially the post-apocalyptic landscapes of the cyberpunk genre remediate the post-war Japanese architecture and reconfigure the relationship between subject and space. These scenarios become prosthetic extensions of the human being hybridized with the machine. The paper consists of two parts. The first frames theoretical coordinates, combining the concept of premediation with animated cinema; in particular for those aspects concerning the architectural and hyper-technological structure imagined by cyberpunk anime. The second part explores and deconstructs animated cyborg-architectures, interpreting them as hipotesis of scenarios in which human beings and designed space hybridize in a single organic device. By describing a few case studies selected on the basis of diegetic coordinates, we suggest relating them to the images of the cyborg urbanism of the Japanese Metabolists of the 1960s. The ultimate goal is to highlight how anime and, in general, images of hyper-technological cities and cyborg architectures anticipate – in their respective areas of expertise – the questions of environmentalization and premediation of the media, orienting design methods and visions of the world in a posthuman key.