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Abstract

In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems - understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as "things" - have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality - how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, "to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials." Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari (and his "serial collaborator" Gilles Deleuze) as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of "media ecology." Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies - "taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously," as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the "medial will to power" illustrated by "the camera that ate itself"; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in "abnormal" relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, "Cctv - world wide watch," that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams. Contributing to debates around standardisation, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture "an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo."

Footnote

Exploring John Hilliard's 1971 series of photographs, A Camera Recording it Own Condition (7 apertures, 10 speeds, 2 mirrors), Fuller argues that the camera's media ecology consists of the interplay between mathematical, material, and social powers, while demonstrating a medial will to power. Fuller shows how every apparatus is an ensemble of other apparatuses. Thresholds of visibility and disappearance are built into the camera's structure, of its material capacity. When the camera focuses on itself, it is engaged in a cybernetic circuit that brings together forces of form, programs, material structures: in short, a media ecology. Fuller marks out two sets of interconnected and antagonistic relations of force that "make" the camera in this act of recording itself. One, the problematic of the camera working on the condition of being a camera (a machine reflexivity). Second, it mobilizes the constraints and freedoms generated by the correlation of the intensive and extensive qualities embedded within the camera. Fuller expands his exploration of media ecologies by working with multiple "objects": the introduction of an on/off switch in a residential street, BITRadio, "phreaking" of radio broadcasts and others. Perhaps the most argumentative chapter of the book-certainly one of the most lucid ones!-this demonstrates how technology and the dynamics of media systems are appropriated for other, nonofficial purposes. Fuller shows how the "standard object"-a serial element such as an ISO standard shipping container whose "potential" has been stabilized, circumscribes knowledge itself, limiting all other forms of understanding. Standard objects, even as they work with other "forms" define the technicity and organizational frames of systems.