Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture

Description:

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."

Matthew Fuller is Reader in Media Design, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. He is the author of Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software.

 

描述：
在《媒體生態學》一書中，馬修·富勒（Matthew Fuller）探討了媒體系統互動時會發生什麼情況。媒體系統這樣的複雜對象，被理解為過程或組成要素，既是信息性的，也是物質性的，但並沒有失去其根本的物質性。富勒關注這種多重物質性，以及它如何被感知、利用和使其他可能性變得具體。他研究了媒體系統中不同特質如何混合和相互關聯，並且如他所寫的，“產生模式、危險和潛力”。富勒引用了菲利克斯·瓜塔里（Felix Guattari）和吉爾·德勒茲（Gilles Deleuze）的著作，以及弗里德里希·尼采（Friedrich Nietzsche）、馬歇爾·麥克盧漢（Marshall McLuhan）、唐娜·哈拉威（Donna Haraway）、弗里德里希·基特勒（Friedrich Kittler）等人的著作，來定義和擴展“媒體生態學”的概念。他認為，了解媒體系統互動時會發生什麼情況的唯一方法就是進行這樣的互動。富勒追蹤了一系列媒體生態學，如他在一章中描述的“同時走遍迷宮的每條路徑”。他研究了當代倫敦的盜播電台及其高低技術媒體系統的交織；以“吞噬自己的相機”為例的“媒體意志力量”；以及在與其他對象“異常”關係時，媒體對象的能力和行為如何受到影響，以及一系列網頁“Cctv - world wide watch”，鼓勵觀眾通過網絡攝像頭報告所見的犯罪。《媒體生態學》對標準化、文化演進、控制論文化和監控等問題做出了貢獻，並創造了一種具有政治挑戰性的美學，將它們聯繫在一起。富勒說，這本書並沒有提供傳統的學術統一框架，而是提出捕捉“一場活動和思想的爆炸，希望能夠加入其中的回聲”。

目錄：
系列前言
前言（喬爾·斯萊頓）
致謝
縮寫
引言：媒體生態學
第一章