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Memory
Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture The notion of 'culture' is changing at the speed of information itself. Computer technology is creating a new kind of public, a cyberculture with all its utopian and apocalyptic possibilities. But is it that new? Popular debate generally ignores cyberculture's historical context. The official history begins in the nineteenth century and tracks the evolution of telecommunications, the egalitarian dream of the global village, and the emergence of the military-industrial complex. However, this omits the deeper, prehistory of technological transformations of culture that are everywhere felt but nowhere seen in the telematic landscape of the late twentieth century. Cyberculture is an extension, rather than innovation, of human engagement with communication and information technologies. A work of archeology, Memory Trade scrapes away the surfaces of the contemporary world to detect the sedimentary traces of the past: a past that inflects the present with the echoes of ancient, unresolved philosophical questions about the relationships between humans and technology, creativity and artifice, reality and representations of reality. 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 reinvention of language in Finnegans Wake, Memory Trade is a reflection of contemporary culture. August,
1998 / 132 pp / Paper / 90-5704-18-12 / T 24
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