The Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture is a research institute of and for the future, combining streamed electronic seminars, print and net publications, digital resources, video archives and a Software Analysis Lab devoted to the exploration of mobility and augmented reality.

Located in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Victoria, PACTAC is a pioneering, multidisciplinary research centre, and home to the electronic scholarly journal CTheory and CTheory Multimedia.

Launched 100 years after the publication of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and a half-century after Marshall McLuhan’s groundbreaking book, Understanding Media, the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture explores the future of technoculture in an age when digital information moves at the speed of light.

At PACTAC, the future meets the past, with theorists, musicians, artists, biogeneticists, philosophers, gamers, coders, and political analysts asking the same question: now that we live in the global village, now that we really inhabit the spacetime fabric moving at light-speed that Einstein envisioned, what should be the social, political and ethical ends of technoculture?

Seeking to represent every spectrum of the digital future, PACTAC Lectures also experiment with broadcasting live performances in multimedia format, dealing with such key issues as augmented reality, the future of genetic engineering, the politics of empire, culture and the end of sound, indigenous resistance, and the fate of the increasingly networked body circulating within the data stream.

PACTAC has supported a new field of study — Critical Digital Studies. Mobilizing a global network of leading digital scholars from many perspectives, Critical Digital Studies (www.criticaldigitalstudies.net) investigates leading tendencies in digital culture as well as imaginative scenarios for the future.