The Division of Society, Culture, Media, and Philosophy at Macquarie University is pleased to host
Darren Tofts for an afternoon workshop on themes arising from his book Memory Trade: a prehistory
of cyberculture (Interface, 1998). We hope that the event will be of interest to staff and students
working in media and communications, cultural studies, philosophy, social sciences, history,
literature, psychology, and cognitive science.

The workshop will include three short commentaries and provocations, refreshments, a response from
Darren Tofts, ample time for discussion, and a quiet drink afterwards. Thanks to the SCMP Research
Fund, there is no fee for attending: but we'd be grateful if, for catering purposes, you could let us know
if you're likely to come along. Please email John Sutton, or phone 9850-8817.

Monday October 23, 2.00-5.00pm: philosophy seminar room, Macquarie Uni, W6A 720
Speakers:
Darren Tofts (Swinburne)
    'Introduction to Memory Trade; and response to the commentaries'
Belinda Barnet (UNSW)
    'Distributed memory and the history of the internet'
Andrew Murphie (UNSW)
    'Nauture - swimming through thought, surfing the mind'
John Sutton (Macquarie)
    'The arts of memory, media, and psychology'

And the next day, Tuesday October 24, Darren Tofts will present a new paper
'Ecologies of Memory: or, Socrates and Philip K. Dick consider Mars a serious option'
at 11am to the philosophy seminar series in W6A 720.

Darren Tofts is Chair of the Department of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of
Technology. A scholar of James Joyce, he has also published extensively in areas relating to new
media and cyberculture, and their intersection with critical theory and the history of writing. His
essays have appeared in internationally recognised journals such as Social Semiotics, UTS
Review, and Southern Review. He was a regular contributor to 21C and World Art magazines.
He is on the editorial board of Continuum, RealTime, Postmodern Culture. and The Australian
Journal of Media and Culture. His most recent collection of essays is Parallax: essays on art,
culture, and technology.

Memory Trade: a prehistory of cyberculture by Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich, is a work of
archeology which 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 questions the utopian and apocalyptic possibilities of contemporary cyberculture.

Read extracts from reviews of Memory Trade.

Here are some images from the book.

John Sutton, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Back to my home page.