Darren Tofts

Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology

The essays brought together in Parallax explore the complexity of cultural production of the late twentieth century, a diverse, swirling interplay of traditional artforms, multimedia, cyberspace, and an overall preoccupation with the coming together of humans and machines: a fascinating nexus of art, culture and technology. Essays include: Machine Metaphysics; Hyperlogic, the Avant-garde and Other Intransitive Acts; Your Place or Mine? Locating Digital Art; Un Autre Coup de Dés. Multimedia and the Game Paradigm; Travelling to Iconica: The Virtual Worlds of Troy Innocent; Parallactic Readings: Joyce, Duchamp and the Fourth Dimension; Ulysses Returns; Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and the Ferocious Dilemma of Expression; ‘Unseizable Enigma’: Notes Towards a New Morphology of the Image; The Passion of Andres Serrano.
Reviews and comments

Meaghan Morris

Darren Tofts can wonder, explain and argue with the best prophets and critics of cyberculture, but better than most he gives us a vivid idea with his writing. These sparkling, erudite essays move with an equal degree of delight and good sense between art, literature, philosophy and new media, past and present. Tofts is an excellent tonic against hype and hypochondria in talk about virtual futures; thoughtful and optimistic, his essays have the inventive force of first-rate cultural criticism.

Niall Lucy (excerpt from Melbourne Launch Speech)

Parallax is a learned book, and so one can learn from it, written both stylishly and, I think most remarkably, in an air of civility that one can learn from too.

Stuart Moulthrop Screening the Past

Tofts’ approach belongs to the broad-minded line of Hugh Kenner, Richard Lanham, Greg Ulmer, and McKenzie Wark, differing from more harrassing masters like Neil Postman and Sven Birkerts. To his great credit, Tofts argues for continuity without discarding discontinuity or heterodoxy: hence his title, implying a mapping across axes of difference.

Mitchell Whitelaw  RealTime

Parallax is a rare specimen, an anthology of locally crafted cultural criticism which tackles, among other things, digital media. The result is a compilation which demonstrates both the diversity and consistency of Tofts’ concerns over the last half-decade or so.

Linda Carroli  fineArt Forum

The insightful and lucid essays each convey a sense of having ‘been there’ or of bearing witness to the events of our own time, the 1990s. It’s what gives the essays an aura of excitement, the ability to account and account for moments and works which might be lost.

Edward Colless  Australian Book Review

A ‘true believer” in the modernist tradition, Tofts’ attention is urgently with the unfinished business of modernism rather than with the ecstatic facility of postmodern e-media stylistics.

Order online through Craftsman House
March, 2000 / 120 pp / Paper / 90-5704-007-7 19 black & white illustrations / 8″ x 6″ (210 x 145 mm)

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