Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Front Cover
Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro
MIT Press, 2002 - 322 pages

Multidisciplinary explorations of the antecedents to cyberculture through examinations of key historical texts, from Plato to Arthur C. Clarke.

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. This book is not for sale in Australia and New Zealand

 

Contents

I
II
III
11
IV
39
V
19
VI
23
VII
31
VIII
31
XVIII
67
XIX
67
XX
67
XXI
67
XXII
67
XXIII
67
XXIV
67
XXV
67

IX
33
X
67
XI
67
XII
67
XIII
67
XIV
67
XV
67
XVI
67
XVII
67
XXVI
67
XXVII
67
XXVIII
67
XXIX
67
XXX
67
XXXI
67
XXXII
67
XXXIII
67
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About the author (2002)

Darren Tofts is Chair of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. Annemarie Jonson teaches in the Arts Informatics Program at the University of Sydney. Alessio Cavallaro is a producer and curator of new media projects at the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

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