Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture

complexity (Stephenson, 1993, 24). As Gibson outlines in Neuromancer, this type of world formation necessitates some hard-core number-crunching: Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white.

Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta (Gibson, 1993, 57).

This is serious computation. In a similar display of digital musculature, Stephenson likens the amount of information required for a computer-generated simulation of such resolution to “a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias” powerdiving into the computer “every couple of minutes, forever” (Stephenson, 1993, 21).

The practitioners of the art of memory not only created such trompe-l’oeil constructions, but they were themselves eidetics, possessing the ability to see them, as if they were actually visible, through the act of oratorical remembrance. Sight was preeminent among the senses. First, because the mode of navigation through loci was visual. Things were seen with an acute inner vision, to the extent that the orator felt himself to be there, present within an “inner place” of high resolution detail. But secondly, and more dramatically, actual words themselves, to be spoken in the performance, were also imaged visually, as Cicero specified in his De oratore: It has been sagaciously discerned by Simonides or else discovered by some other person, that the most complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the senses, but that the keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and that consequently perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes (quoted in Yates, 1996, 19).

This is the ideal of immersion. A virtual world that not only runs parallel with actuality, that can be “entered into,” but that also, through the folding-in of virtuality with virtuosity, enables the orator to speak with impressive ingenuity, producing an 107