Letter from the Guest Editor

The assumption underlying this special issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture is that technology is able to, or can be used to, reflect on technology, to establish an interpretive or interpolative loop. Such a loop is even present in this special issue, as many of these papers were developed out of a conference held at the 2019 Sydney Underground Film Festival entitled “Inhuman Screens,” which examined diverse themes related to technology and perception. The “inhuman” was used loosely to mean “not human in nature or quality,” as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, and as such to broadly encompass concerns related to posthumanism as well as the inorganic and the machine. However, there is also a moral implication to the term inhuman that suggests the absence of emotion, especially empathy and a concern for one’s environs. It is fitting, therefore, that this issue commences with an article by Sean Cubitt that captures the importance of how we mediate the environment and how it remains incapable of being mediated. I have chosen to begin with Lyotard’s contentious quote to remind us also that the inhuman has a philosophical, specifically ontological, connotation, one related to processing, reading, re-cognizing, or simply viewing the human through the prism of the machine or at least from a perspective beyond how we may often like to think of ourselves—the human stripped of humanist comforts. However, the term inhuman has other philosophical definitions as well, often linked with the former dictionary definitions. For example, in her book The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti contrasts Letter from the Guest Editor Stefan Octavian POPeScu | Sydney univerSity