Fuller, M.: Media ecologies : materialist energies in art and technoculture (2005)
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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
- Moving on to Web pages-Heath Bunting's cctv-world wide watch, where users watching four Webcams are encouraged to report crimes on an HTML form, which is then sent to the nearest police station-Fuller shows how cultural and technological components mesh uneasily in the project. Fuller argues that the "meme" (a kind of replicator that mutates as it passes from person to person or media to media, and works in combination with its immediate environment) or "bit" of identity constitutes a problem for surveillance. Packets of information-often the most common "meme" in Web technology-is, for Fuller, the standard object around which an ecology gets built. Networks check packets as they pass isolating passwords, URLS, credit data, and items of interest. The packet is the threshold of operations. The meme's "monitorability" enables not only dissemination through the network, but also its control. Memes, or what Fuller calls "flecks of identity" are referents in the flows of information-they "locate" and "situate" a user. Fuller's work is full of rich insights, especially into the ways in which forces of power operate within media ecologies. Even when the material/technological object, such as the camera or the Webcam turns in on itself, it is situated within a series of interrelated forces, some of which are antagonistic to the object. This insight-that contemporary media technology works within a field of antagonistic forces too-is Fuller's major contribution. Fuller is alert also to the potential within such force fields for subversion. Pirate radio and phreaking, therefore, emblematize how media ecologies create the context, possibility, and even modalities of political and social protest. Unfortunately, Fuller's style is a shade too digressive and aleatory for us to discover these insights. In his eagerness to incorporate as many theorists and philosophers of media/technology-he moves from Nietzsche to Susan Blackmore, sometimes within the space of a single paragraph-Fuller often takes a long time to get to his contribution to the debate or analysis. The problem, therefore, is mainly with style rather than content, and the arguments would have been perfectly fine if they had been couched in easier forms."
