Darren Tofts

Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson & Alessio Cavallaro

Power Publications (Sydney) & MIT Press (Cambridge, MA.)

2003 The vast social apparatus of the computer network has aligned people with technology in unprecedented ways. The intimacy of the human-computer interface has made it impossible to distinguish technology from the social and cultural business of being human. Cyberculture is the broader name given to this process of becoming through technological means. This book shows that cyberculture has been a long time coming.

In Prefiguring Cyberculture , media critics and theorists, philosophers, and historians of science explore the antecedents of such aspects of contemporary technological culture as the Internet, the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, virtual reality, and the cyborg. The contributors examine key texts that anticipate cybercultural practice and theory, including Plato’s “Simile of the Cave”; the Renaissance Ars Memoria; Descartes’s Meditations (on the mind-body split); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence; Philip K. Dick’s Man, Android, and Machine; William Gibson’s Neuromancer; and Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future. In the final section, a number of cyberculture artists explore how cybercultural themes have been taken up and critiqued in the electronic arts.

Contributors:

Russell Blackford, Damien Broderick, Justine Cooper, Francesca da Rimini, Char Davies, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Troy Innocent, Stephen Jones, Evelyn Fox Keller, VNS Matrix, Bruce Mazlish, Jon McCormack, Scott McQuire, Simon Penny, Patricia Piccinini, John Potts, Richard Slaughter, Zoe Sofoulis, Stelarc, John Sutton, Donald Theall, Gregory Ulmer, Samuel Umland, Catherine Waldby, McKenzie Wark, Margaret Wertheim, Karl Wessel, Elizabeth A. Wilson.

MIT Press

 

Reviews and comments

Cyberculture has a history, a deeply layered and non-teleological history, a history full of surprises both good and bad, a history replete with consequences for what it means to speak of the human in ‘informatic’ or ‘post-human’ idioms. This passionate, multi-lobed conviction is the generative organ of this wonderful book. The shapes of history matter here as much as its temporalities, as much as its subjectivities. Indeed, shape, time, and subject mutually reconfigure each other in the prefigurings in fiction, science, and technology that this book explores. Prefiguring Cyberculture explores what the editors call the ‘continuous present tense.’ That is the always unfinished time in which classifications of what may count as human and nonhuman morph within lived technologies that bear the stigmata of the signifying monster called information. Reading this book is an exercise in reconfiguring how we see how we are in this formation called cyberculture. In the process, readers enjoy what binds the authors and editors together–the capacity to be surprised in the belly of the monster.
Donna Haraway, Professor, History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz and author of The Cyborg Manifesto and Modest Witness@Second_Millennium

This book is an intellectual “tour de force” – a seminal work in the fields of cyberculture and human-machine symbiosis. I believe this book, apart from being incredibly inspiring and enlightening now, will become a classic like Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women; that is, an essential reference volume for many fields of inquiry.
Rob Harle, Leonardo Digital Reviews

A work of great power and great intellectual substance.
David Weinstock, American Communication Journal

I am drawn to revisit this book over and over again. Every essay makes the reader excited to learn about the virtual and real worlds we live in, thus having created a book one will pull off the shelf many more times.
Gerald Ganglbauer, Gangway Reviews

This is an indispensable tome jam-packed with extraordinary insights from writers who hammer home Tofts’ premise that both cyberculture – and its attendant techno-fear – have a long history.
Ashley Crawford, The Age

This collection is a considerable achievement.
Mitchell Whitelaw, RealTime

Prefiguring Cyberculture is a fascinating book for those interested in the history and philosophy of information technology and information science and the impact that these have on society.
Madely du Preez, Electronic Library

For those who think The Matrix trilogy rocked their world, there’s serious cyber thrill in these pages.
FHM (South-East Asia)

The contributor roll-call reads almost like cyberculture’s Hall of Fame.
Pawel Frelik, SFRA Review

It is basically a book to be used as one would use the Internet itself.
Dan Lozer, Science and Theology News

Prefiguring Cyberculture is an erudite exploration of technology and its ever-evolving role within existing and new human social and cultural contexts.
Paul Putman, Student Affairs On-line

I found Prefiguring Cyberculture intensely thought provoking.
Nick Mercer, Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies

A compelling collection of essays that point to innovative critical and aesthetic forward directions through their insightful examinations of the past. It is a valuable and compelling read for anyone concerned with where technology has come from and where it might go.
Alex Reid, Electronic Book Review

Tofts, Jonson and Cavallaro have put together a mighty inspiration for this most future-oriented of all professions.
Sean Cubitt, Screening the Past

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