CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology, and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as theorisations of major "event- scenes" in the mediascape.

Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

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    When you first alight on CTHEORY, you're convinced you have stumbled on a treasure- trove of trendsetting academic writing -- at least as it is refracted through the ocular devices of the editors Arthur and Marie-Louise Kroker. Contained within their five-year run are some of the names associated with contemporary cultural theory and more particularly cybercultural theory. Baudrillard was an earlier contributor, as were Paul Virilio, R.U. Sirius, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling and Friedrich Kittler. What's more, the Internet journal contains a five year archive of the ebbs and flows of cultural theory in the emerging era of the World Wide Web and digital culture. The Krokers are engaged scholars and have traversed from the academy to the art world to art and cultural theory. They have produced a rap CD and Arthur at least has been interviewed in Wired magazine and significantly labeled therein as an important guru.

    This cultivation of the cultural crosses and transdisciplinarity that the Krokers have generated through CTHEORY has taken a great deal of time to coalesce. To get a sense of the prehistory of CTHEORY it's necessary to look at the groundbreaking Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, which under Arthur Kroker's stewardship gradually embodied the same migrating political theory that spawned CTHEORY. The earlier print journal provided critical debates that fostered different directions in media theory (the infamous blindspot debate in communication), cultural theory (through studies of the body, the Japanese moment, and placing panic in the lexicon of art and culture) and postmodernity (a reading of the postmodern that celebrated in the context of a cultural and political economy of excess).

    From this base, CTHEORY launched into studies of digital culture and investigated the links between cyberculture and cybernetics as well as the new generation of what the Krokers labeled as Data trash.

    Articles arrive without fanfare or announcement irregularly -- this could be seen as subverting the cohesive and hermetically sealed quality of print journals; but it could equally be seen that in its anarchy there is no clear agenda of what constitutes the content of CTHEORY. This may be intentional. But there are signs of some organisation. Articles are divided up into book reviews, what are called event- scenes and articles. In a reverse twist of organisation, the articles are last in this long list. There appear to be numbers and dates on some articles, but these are not consistently sequenced and may indicate some need to transform their filing system so that the content is presented into different pages. With five years worth of articles, there are sections which are listed at the end which appear to no longer have currency -- Cyberdays as a subsection seems to have run out of steam in 1996, and likewise Global Algorithm has suffered a clear demise by the same year. There is no explanation; no situating or editorialising -- which may indicate that these areas of the list are like volcanoes and only temporarily dormant.

    A more recent effort that clearly identifies the energy of the journal is a multimedia initiative called Digital Dirt, which presents a patterned combination of words, texts and sounds about how the superhygiene world of the digital constitutes its dirt, its errors of codes, viruses, gifs and system failures. Performance art of the id is displayed by a Swedish artist. It's clever and moves in an interesting hybridity of artistic and intellectual practice. The usual frustration with audio and video players invades the pleasures of this part of the journal.

    All this energy is under some risk. Apparently, CTHEORY is looking for a new institutional home to support its rhizomatic movements through the culture. Despite its problems with uncreative formatting, CTHEORY bursts with intellectual electricity and creative reading of the negentropy of the contemporary. It's worth repeated visits.