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Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Darren Tofts, et. al. eds.
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2002.
322 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 1-262-20145-3.

Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

recluse@lis.net.au

This book is an intellectual ‘tour de force’ — a seminal work in the fields of cyberculture and human-machine symbiosis.

As the title suggests the book has a strong historical underpinning. This is no dry, boring history though, the book is very much in the here - now. The various contributing authors bring to light little known aspects of the subject in quite fascinating and enlightening ways. For example, before I read Elizabeth Wilson’s essay on Alan Turing (pp. 38-51), I thought ‘here we go again with yet another description of the Turing Test.’ Surprise, surprise no description, but a fascinating account of Turing’s life outlining how and why he was involved with computers and artificial intelligence.

Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History is divided into four sections. Section One — Robots: AI, Alife & Cyborgs. Section Two — Virtuality: Webworlds & Cyberspaces. Section Three — Visible Unrealities: Artists’ Statements. Section Four — Futuropolis: Postmillennial Speculations. Sections 1,2 & 4 consists of six or seven essays written by well known academics and artists. As Katherine Hayles says in the foreword, “The essays, richly diverse, converge in arguing that technology alone is not sufficient to understand the evolution of cyberculture. Historical context shapes how the technology will be conceived, understood and implemented” (p. xii).

Section Three consists of statements by ten artists, together with colour illustrations of their work. Technology is an essential aspect or concern of their work in various and specific ways. This ranges from Stelarc’s “body integrating technologies” to Char Davies’ “technology and the environment” issues. At the beginning of Davies’ statement she says, “...as I write on my laptop in the middle of a forest by the edge of the Pacific in British Columbia among sweet cedar, hemlock and fern (p. 192). I found this somewhat ironic in that I am writing this review on my laptop in the middle of a forest (wildlife sanctuary where I live and work) in the rainforest hills of northern NSW, Australia.

I point this out because this book is far more than a history of cyberculture and its associated high technologies, it is also about our embodied existence on this planet and our relationship with technology both past, present and most importantly in the future. The editors actually define this time-state as, “the continuous present tense”, “Prefiguring Cyberculture is not concerned with identifying how we “became posthuman”, but rather demonstrating how becoming informatic is an ongoing process of the continuous present tense” (p. 5). It is in this “continuous present” that such phenomena as the Internet, World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, virtual reality and cyborgs are critically discussed.

This book had a long (and torturous) gestation period, over five years, perhaps it is this that has produced a book of exceptional scholarly quality and immensely enjoyable readability. Answering Hayles’ rhetorical question (p. xii) about how the book will fare over time, regarding the concept of redundancy or becoming outdated. I believe this book, apart from being incredibly inspiring and enlightening now, will become a classic like Donna Haraway’s (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women,that is, an essential reference volume for many fields of inquiry.

 

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