[Nettime-bold] Lachlan's 'difference engine' proposal 1994

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Difference Engine
memories . histories . futures


©copyright reverts to the common treasury

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About Difference Engine 
Aims
Difference Engine is a search engine into
 cultures and communities, and a developing 
digital press. We aim to creatively employ 
new technologies of information and 
communication, to provide critical Content
 relevant to the 'digital revolution', within 
an innovative environment or architecture, 
while developing on-line working practices and 
editorial protocols in digital publishing. We
 seek to identify productive questions around
 the common cultural meanings of new technologies of communication and infor
mation in relation to media and cultural histories. To circulate alternative critical 
models and theoretical approaches to issues 
raised by new media formations, experiment 
with new publishing formats and bring into 
dialogue different disciplines and 
specialisms -- in theory and in practice -- 
in cultural criticism, science, technology, and the arts.

Contributions
Writers, musicians, artists, designers, 
artist-engineers, researchers and cultural 
critics are invited to contribute objects 
(papers or projects) which explore issues of production, circulation and reception within the new media; curatorial or editorial issues arising from working in new communication and information technologies; institutional developments and new forms of cross-specialist practices; questions arising from the contemporary integration of means of access to remote resources (typified by WWW) with environments of collaborative work and communication (MOOs etc.); historical and contemporary debates around community, affinities and the formations of public spheres; all within the map of cultural variants of gender, ethnicity, generation, sexuality and class.
the Web Journal
Difference Engine examines some of the cultural implications of new communication and information technologies, and situates the social, political and economic expectations for global technologies within the histories of the media the 'new media' is meant to supplant or absorb. It examines the political, institutional and corporate contexts from which the Internet emerges. We are particularly interested in works which help to redefine debates on culture and technology by analyzing the production, circulation and reception of representations, and by investigating the cultural policies, political economies and systematic exclusions which regulate and control access to the meanings of culture, to information and to concrete political participation.
Difference Engine provides a scholarly (peer-reviewed), artistic and technical context for the discussion of the possibilities and limitations in the transformations of media cultures and institutions. It examines the consequences of new technologies on community, identities and aesthetics, and helps to shape, inform and probelmatise our understanding of media, discourse and culture. Encouraged by the radical possibilities that the contemporary integration of 'remote resource access' with 'collaborative work and communication' allows, Difference Engine seeks work which explores issues of culture and community, institutions, subjectivities, identities and affinities, and the formations of public spheres.
Future
Beside the Web journal, whose first two issues are now available, Difference Engine will also publish Critical Fictions and an archive of Virtual Press Pamphlets or "working papers on culture". These may include historical pamphlets, no longer in print (in a sense the radical history of the press is the place where this Internet press began), working papers digitalised from their stencil or photocopy form, and new papers written in HTML. As Difference Engine resides in the space between conventional and 'new' media, it will also contain archives listing the publications, books, journals, magazines, of regional print presses to help extend their potential readership, while retaining their local publishing commitments and mandates.
Besides publications, Difference Engine will contain The Third Virtual Room - a good place for 'non-technical' users to begin exploring some of the radical cultural implications of the integration of remote resource access with collaborative communication on the WWW and in MOOs.


Lachlan Brown,
Media and Communications
Goldsmiths College
University of London
London SE14 6NW
email:glb2@ukc.ac.uk



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