A "dirty materialist" ride through the media cultures of pirate
radio, photography, the Internet, media art, cultural evolution,
and surveillance. 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 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 standardization, 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."
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