… but the clouds : a valediction permitting mourning, in three stages of decline

Cloud” is the most appalling metaphor we have had to describe the global network of integrated data.  It is a portent of dread always on the way to disappearance.  Let me tell you why.

Darren Tofts is Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
He is a well-known cultural critic who writes regularly for a range of national and international publications on issues to do with cyberculture, new media arts, remix culture and literary and cultural theory. He is the author (with artist Murray McKeich) of Memory Trade. A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Sydney, Interface Books, 1998), Parallax. Essays on Art, Culture and Technology (Sydney, Interface Books 1999) and Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (Thames and Hudson: Sydney, 2005). With Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro he edited Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Power Publications/MIT Press, 2003) and with Lisa Gye edited Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix (ALT-X Press, 2007).  His most recent book is Alephbet: Essays on ghost-writing, nutshells & infinite space (Prague/Litterraria Pragensia, 2013).