Darren Tofts – Memory Trade – Review

 

The legendary writer of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, when writing his experimental work, Mexico City Blues, attempted to achieve the 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 subterranean world of the San Francisco 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 boundaries of received notions of art beyond the imposed limits of the bourgeoisie - 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 integrates prose and image. Memory Trade explores the antecedents of a much overused 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 flippantly 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 archaeological 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 construct 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, surfaced, as a result of abductive thinking, as opposed to typical, deductive methods of reasoning. More to the point, Memory Trade is an investigation into cyberculture's unconscious; a quest towards unexplored 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, to appear erudite, are couched in specialized terms that actually hide more than they reveal. On the other hand, this book enlightens me 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.