Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture [Paperback]

Darren Tofts (Author), Murray McKeich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1998

...a humanistic and archeological approach to the way technology, cyberspace in particular, has transformed our culture...explores the ancient origins of the relationships between humans & technology, creativity & artifice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: Craftsman House (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9057041812
• ISBN-13: 978-9057041815
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 10 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,774,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful Historical Reading, April 13, 1999

By 

Alex Burns ([e-mail]) (Melbourne (Australia)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Paperback)

In this tightly written volume, Australian author and academic Darren Tofts (internationally known for his essays with the fine science/cyberculture journal 21.C) surveys cyberculture's hidden legacy in literary theory, surrealism, and semiotics.

Tofts takes great care to critically reference his material, and the lavish artwork vividly conveys the book's high production values.

Necessary reading to track the pre-World War II aesthetics and artistic culture that would give rise to Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, showing how artistic movements mutated as 'life conditions' (mass psycho-social, memetic, and economic baselines) changed into radically new forms.

'Memory Trade' is extremely useful for an academic or university-level audience, particularly for students undertaking media studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, and art history.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for students of lit and cyberculture., July 12, 2001

By 

C. Middleton (Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Paperback)

The legendary writer if the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, when writing his experimental work, Mexico City Blues, attempted to achieve a synthesis between his prose and the jazz sounds of the mythical saxophonist, Charlie Parker. In a letter to William Burroughs, he describes at length, sitting in the subteranean world of the San Fransisco bar scene, a bourbon clinched in one hand and a pen in the other, lost in a fit of Dionysian abandon, recording the notes and improvisational screams of the music, pushing the bounderies of received notions of art beyond the imposed limits of the bourgeoise - this was indeed a new art form in the making.

In a collaboration between writer and artist, Tofts and McKeitch have produced a work that beautifully intergrates prose and image. Memory Trade explores the antecedents of a much over used and abused term: Cyberculture. This word, (which was originally coined by the Canadian science fiction writer, William Gibson in 1980) has become so much a part of popular culture, that we flipantly assume we understand what it means. Nothing can be further from the truth. Memory Trade brilliantly removes the 'Spice Girls factor' from the term, and takes the reader on a kind of archeological expedition to a time before the birth of Christ, uncovering the secrets of cyberculture's very beginnings.

This book is not your standard history text that conservatively presents the reader with a chronological format of time, place form and event. As Tofts states, Memory Trade is "not trying to present a genealogy of concatenation, of neatly linked motivations and actions, but rather to contruct a narrative of syncopation, of shifting emphases and digressions in word and image." In other words, the insights gained in this text concerning the prehistory of cyberculture, have come about, sufaced, as a result of abductive thinking, as oppossed to typical, deductive methods of reasoning. More to the point, Memory Trade is an investigation into cybercultures's unconscious; a quest towards unexpolored realms; a hunt for the unexpected - "an examination of technologizing the world".

This is not to say, of course, that the book reads like a postmodern text, jumping in some non-sequential, non-linear format. Memory Trade is exhaustively well researched and argues its subject matter in an elegant, persuasive manner. In many 'academic' texts, for example, the prose, in an effort to appear erudite, are couched in specialized terms that actually hide more than they reveal. This book, on the other hand, enlightens, because it is written in a well organized 'user friendly' manner. In fact, for those of you who have only a casual interest in cyberculture, this book should educate as well as entertain.

I should also stress that McKeitch is not simply the 'illustrator' of the book. These extraordinary images that he has produced carry as much weight and significance as the words. More precisely, the book is a multi-timed text, that, to a great extent, should be read in a milieu of both image and text, as the book achieves a synthesis of both word and picture.

Look for this book and read it. It will be well worth the trouble.

5.0 out of 5 stars Rise of the Pheonix, January 27, 2012

By 

Ashley Crawford "Ashley Crawford" (Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Paperback)

Memory Trade is a pulsating romp through the pre-life of our digitized age. It is a hybrid stitch-up of text and image going mano-o-mano page by page. It is hyper-caffeinated scholarly musing with a touch of lysergic acid. It is a world where Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes trade cigars with Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and Giles Deleuze while William Gibson and James Joyce talk emailia and cyberspace.

First published in 1998 in analog form, Memory Trade was conceived by Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich as a manic dialogue of thought and image. Like Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, it is an `imaginary' history of often unlikely, but all too accurate linkages. Memory Trade is an exploration, in text and image, of the unconscious of cyberculture, its silent, secret prehistory. From Plato's Cave to Borges' literary labyrinths, Freud's Mystic Writing-Pad, and Joyce's bairdboard bombarment, Memory Trade is an hallucinogenic palimpsest of contemporary culture.

Memory Trade rapidly sold-out and has been much sought after ever since. Fourteen years after it first appeared Memory Trade refuses to age or become irrelevant, thus 21C magazine has re-published it in digital form, phoenix-like, as an e-book that is as sumptuous as the original.