ABSTRACT
The significance of the relationship between humans and technology is illustrated perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the prelude to Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Having discovered in a thrilling ‘eureka’ moment the radically transformative potential of using an animal bone as a weapon, both for hunting prey and for defending the social group from predators and competitors, the prehistoric ape-man on which the first 25 minutes of the drama have focused jubilantly tosses his newfound tool high into the air (Ambrose 2001: 1748). The camera tracks its ascent as it twists and turns before morphing, in a perfectly timed jump-cut, into a 21st-century spaceship gliding serenely in orbit above the Earth below. What Kubrick’s scene seeks to show is that it is our use of technology that has made us who we are today, that has enabled us to become not simply the dominant species on the planet, but the only species to have left our home planet and to have set foot on another world.
