[P2P-F] Fwd: http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Phoebe Moore <pvm.doc at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 3:26 PM
Subject:
http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/

This just out!<http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/>
 Issue 17 – Unnatural Ecologies
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This issue is an exercise in media ecology that is paradoxically unnatural.
Instead of assuming a natural connection to the established tradition of
Media Ecology in the Toronto-school fashion of Marshall McLuhan, Neil
Postman, and the work of scholars involved in the Media Ecology Association
(http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/), our issue stems from another
direction; its theoretical orientation is more inspired by the work of Felix
Guattari and engages with several overlapping ecologies that are
aesthetico-political in their nature. It stems from a more politically
oriented way of understanding the various scales and layers through which
media are articulated together with politics, capitalism and nature, in
which processes of media and technology cannot be detached from
subjectivation. In this context, media ecology is itself a vibrant sphere of
dynamics and turbulences including on its technical level. Technology is not
only a passive surface for the inscription of meanings and signification,
but a material assemblage that partakes in machinic ecologies. And, instead
of assuming that ‘ecologies’ are by their nature natural (even if
naturalizing perhaps in terms of their impact on capacities of sensation and
thought) we assume them as radically contingent and dynamic, in other words
as prone to change.

The concept of media ecology was revived in 2005 by Matthew Fuller’s
theoretically novel take on the idea. His *Media Ecologies: Materialist
Energies in Art and Technoculture* set out to map the ‘dynamic
interrelation[s] of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and
matter’ (Fuller 2005: 2) in a culture where the relation between materiality
and information has been redefined. Steering clear of earlier celebrations
of media as informational environments which dismiss any connection with the
physical as for example with the cyberculture of the 1980s and 1990s –
Fuller is keen to map out how we can develop a material vocabulary for media
ecological processes. The roots of such a vocabulary—that bends itself to
the intensive connections of pirate radios and voice, the photographic
medium and the Internet as well as such informational entities as memes—come
from Whitehead, Simondon, Nietzsche as well as Guattari and contemporary
writers such as Katherine N. Hayles. What emerges is a different genealogy
for theories of media ecology.

What was demonstrated already in Fuller’s take on the concept was a special
appreciation of material practices involved in establishing the regimes of
media ecologies. Media ecologies are quite often understood by Fuller
through artistic/activist practices rather than pre-formed theories, which
precisely work through the complex media layers in which on the one hand
subjectivation and agency are articulated and, on the other hand, the
materiality of informational objects gets distributed, dispersed and takes
effect. Media ecological platforms can be seen to range from network
environments for philosophy and media activism as in Rekombinant (
http://www.rekombinant.org) to art platforms on the net such as Runme.org (
http://runme.org/). Related themes can be detected in the various
negotiations of nature being remixed, resurfaced, revisualized or sonified
through media environments. Examples include  Natalie Jeremijenko’s work,
the Harwood-Yokokoji-Wright Eco Media collaboration (featured in Parikka
-this Issue), biological art projects such as Amy Youngs’s The Digestive
Table (2006, http://hypernatural.com/digestive.html), the work of
activist/artistic groupings like Critical Art Ensemble, the Yes Men or the
Wu Ming foundation and various bioart projects of recent years. In all these
cases a dynamic media ecology is generated, incorporating natural, technical
and informational components and giving rise to singular processes of
subjectivation that are equally an essential part of the media ecology.

For Fuller, the question of affordances is a central way to understand the
interaction of various regimes of materiality. Affordance is a term that
stems from J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology and is attributed to the
capacities for interaction of living bodies. For Fuller, this concept is
applicable more widely, and affording capacities became a methodological
pathway to understanding various art/ecology-practices:

 Just as capacities of thought, of being, are made in lived bodies, in
complex and delicately conjoined tissues and processes, and just as powers
are inherent in all matter, materialism also requires that the capacities of
activity, thought, sensation, and affect possible to each composition
whether organic or not are shaped by what it is, what it connects to, and
the dimensions of relationality around it. (Fuller 2005: 174)

In this sense, artistic work, whether engaging with animal bodies,
technological assemblages, or their combinations and relations, can be seen
as an ecological – or even ecosophical – mapping of potential universes of
enunciation as well as sensation (see also Parikka, 2010).

More than a question of interpretation, media ecology addresses the crucial
question of activity; what do media do? The classical media ecological
theorists already asked similar questions about the effects of media
environments on the human sensorium and mental capacities but increasingly,
with this more recent wave of media ecological interests, we are attached
not only to questions concerning such molar formations as the human
organism, but also the molecular fluxes in which bodies are formed. We are
as interested in ecologies of non-humans, whether on the microbial scale or
on the scale of techno-scientific objects. All demand a new attitude tuned
to matter and defined through its vibrancy (see Bennett, 2010). We are
interested in bodies, and in forces (in)forming those bodies, in their state
of emergence; the processes in which and through which bodies consolidate,
stabilized, form, and further deform.

In our view, theories of media ecology are closely linked with practice in
the sense that theory itself is viewed as a media ecological
practice.Fuller’s book opens with a key statement regarding theory itself as
media ecological practice : ‘This is a media ecology made in bits of paper’
(Fuller, 2005: 1). His contribution to this issue extends this concern. He
explores the generativity of ‘Faulty Theory’ – theory given over to the
potential of the indeterminable, the anomaly, the ‘pata-physical’. Sites of
enunciation, or indeed ecologies of enunciation in which both theory and
practice take place become concerns from a media ecological perspective.
The question of disciplines, institutions and, increasingly, of
transdisciplinarity, haunts not only the theoretical mindset but the wider
frameworks in which processes of subjectivation are to be situated within
techno-capitalist contexts. As Matthew Fuller outlines in this issue, theory
itself is a thick, materialist practice. It is far from immaterial or simply
representational, displaying a unique affordance for ‘graspings and
imagination’. The articles in this issue unpack related concepts and
practices of media ecologies from a variety of perspectives.

In Goddard’s article, ‘Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies’, an effort
is made to distinguish the emergent paradigm of media ecologies (with an “S”
as Goddard might say) from ‘actually existing’ media ecology. The appearance
of Fuller’s book was understandably unsettling for those of the media
ecological school and certainly marks at least a profound rupture in the
media ecological paradigm, if not a total break. The article goes on to
examine one of the key sources for this break, namely Felix Guattari’s
engagements with both media and ecology. It especially focuses on the way
Guattari’s media ecologies were energised by and engaged with free radio
movements in both Italy and France. The media ecological dynamics
surrounding free radios were inseparable from the radical political
movements from which they emerged and of which they were a key component.
The article traces how, with the decline of these political energies, these
ecologies could no longer be sustained. Nevertheless, in examples ranging
from the London pirate radio analysed so brilliantly in Fuller’s book to
forms of tactical and sovereign media, the political potential of media
ecologies remain active and effective in contemporary digital conditions,
especially in relation to new and diverse modes of subjectivation.

The politics of media ecology is picked up by Phoebe Moore in her article
‘Peer to Peer Production: Revolution or Subjectivation?’. Moore addresses
P2P forms of organization in the context of media ecology, and mobilizes the
force of change as part of the investigation; how is real social change
possible, and how do alternative forms of organization – such as horizontal,
non-hierarchical networks among peers – challenge and function in neoliberal
digital media culture? Also proceeding from a Guattarian perspective to the
multiple ecological spheres in which aesthetics, organization, political
economy and activism co-function in complex ties, her article addresses
media ecology as an analysis of subjectivation; responding to the question
of how to invent such forms of productive relations which fall outside the
proprietary logic and function according to an ‘open source model.’

Michel Bauwens, one of the theorists Moore draws upon, has elaborated the
political economy of peer to peer as an ecology of peer production,
governance and property – of the ‘Commons’. This is a crucial theme for
contemporary political networks and social production. In her text on the
concept of autocreativity and artistic media ecological platforms Olga
Goriunova elaborates the specific modes of production/creativity that go
hand-in-hand with ecologies of software and other technical platforms.
Goriunova emphasises the work of art platforms in offering catalyst forces,
coherence and maintenance to aesthetic processes and practices. Defining the
notion of ‘art platforms’ as ‘a terminological solution for describing a
website or an ensemble of human-technical objects reflexive of their own
processual devising, which act as a catalyst in the development of an
exceptionally vivid cultural or artistic current,’ she is able to address
the multiplicities of forces engaged in what could be called the
organization of creativity. Again, we can bluntly state that of course there
has not been a lack of such organization in the midst of the hype
surrounding creative industries, but Goriunova maps out the more ‘dirty’ and
processual forms of activities that might self-conceptualise themselves as
art—if not necessarily always as “art”. The article employs the idea of
self-organization, but again in a Guattarian wake flags it as a process of
differentiation; again, we are dealing with media ecologies that both resist
hylomorphism (the technicality of such platforms is not detached from the
artistic, the ideational), and employ an ‘unnatural’ ecology characterized
by metastability, to use a term from Gilbert Simondon.

Jussi Parikka’s text on nature reframed as media also employs theoretical
support from Simondon among others to argue that projects such as EcoMedia
(Harwood-Wright-Yokokoji) and Dead Media (Garnet Hertz) encourage a wider
understanding of media. Here, media ecology is taken to be the investigation
of the complex transformations, transactions and reemployments of “nature”
as a force from which our understanding of media stems. The art projects
themselves act as catalysts for a non-human perspective on contemporary
media, and natural processes are used to investigate the idea of media as an
affordance—less a substance than a process of affording spatial and temporal
relations between people, but also between things non-human. In this
context, Parikka’s text maps the relations between media ecology and media
archaeology as well, through the question of the complex temporal timescales
in which media and ecology take place.

It seems that we increasingly need such perspectives that are able to
analyze and understand natures and technologies as interlinked; for example
the environmental contexts of information technology where it is quite
rarely realized that social networks might run on coal powered energy
[1]<http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/#[1]>,
or in the way in which supposedly immaterial information technologies are a
key origin of a future ecocatastrophe of toxic chemicals
[2]<http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/#[2]>,
or
in the way in which natures and cultures are constantly mediated in networks
of relations of *political* ecology, in what Jane Bennett calls aptly ‘a
knotted world of vibrant matter’ (2010: 13).

Hence, the translations and transpositions from biology to media ecologies
and spheres need careful scrutiny. Such a critique is addressed in Matteo
Pasquinelli’s article ‘Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics
and Biomorphic Media Theory’. He investigates the figures of the biological
inherent in our current vocabulary of political media cultures, and in
concepts from multitudes to swarms. He also focuses on how inherently we
have grown to think of the digital, and code, through notions that suggest a
seeming universality adopted from biological research, especially from DNA.
Pasquinelli argues for a detailed, multi-layered geneaology of entropy not
only in relation to digital code, but also from the viewpoints of the
biological, as well as the mineral. Hence, the article argues that instead
of enthusiasm for ‘code’ as the final referent for media ecologies of
network culture, we should turn to energetics, understanding political
ecologies in the light of the life of micro-organisms. In order to avoid
code reductionism, what is proposed is a “wetter” approach to bodies, and
ecologies of machines of heterogeneous kinds, through which,
methodologically, one is able to map the biopolitics of network organisms
and their reliance on the processes of abstraction at the core of this
ontology of code. In this way one can also provide alternatives that are
more material, more heterogeneous in their ecology.

The final contribution to this issue, and its concerns with the materiality
of media ecologies, comes from Matthew Fuller’s already mentioned essay
entitled ‘Faulty Theory.’ Rather than continue the exploration of media
ecologies began in his earlier work, Fuller turns his attention towards
“theory,” finding it every bit as thick and material as the other more
obviously material ecologies dealt with in this issue. In particular, Fuller
is interested in the anomalous theories and thinking machines of figures
such as Gordon Pask, Alfred Jarry and Charles Fort, as modes of theory that
do far more than disturb conventional distinctions between theory and
practice. Rather, as “faulty theories” for which error is not so much a
fault to be corrected as a fault-line to be followed, they constitute
experimental engagements with the world that are perhaps more practical than
practice itself since they consider language, ideas, thinking machines and
the other components of theory as materials to be worked with rather than as
representational abstractions. More than this, rather than just working
through words and their conventional supports of the printed page, faulty
theory also engages with, in Fuller’s terms, ‘forms of ideational devices,
robots, blags, and the ruses of things, rules and jokes.’

As the articles in this issue argue, media ecologies is able to provide
methodological clues with which to map the messy ontologies of contemporary
culture—the translations and transpositions between nature and technology,
but also between subjectivity and media, the social and the political, and
the political economy in which such energetic processes take place. The
articles show how media ecology, as a direction within media studies, has
resonances with other new ideas—in new materialism, media archaeology and
political philosophy—that deal with new kinds of bodies. These bodies are
not always human, not always solid, and not always clearly
visible/representable. Media ecology is able to analyse a media culture that
is becoming less about apparatuses and solids, and more about waves,
vibrations, streams, processes and movements. As such, media ecology is
expanding the possibilities of where media studies can go.

*References*

Bennett, Jane. *Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things.* Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010.

Fuller, Matthew. *Media Ecologies. Materialist Energies in Art and
Technoculture.* Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005.

Parikka, Jussi.* Insect Media. An Archaeology of Animals and
Technology.* Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

*Endnotes*

[1]<http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/#1>
See
‘Facebook faces campaign to switch to renewable energy,’ The Guardian
September 1, 2010 . See also the Harwood and Yokokoji project Coal Fired
Computers (2010) which brilliantly maps the long networks in which coal and
computers are interlinked.
http://www.avfestival.co.uk/programme/10/events/coal-fired-computers.  See
also ‘Pits to Bits,’ Matthew Fuller interviewing Graham Harwood (July,
2010).

[2]<http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/issue-17-unnatural-ecologies/#2>
See
Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media Project, , and also Mel Chin’s Revival Field in
which he uses specific plants to clean the soil of toxics through the
process of ‘hyperaccumulation’ where the plant suchs heavy metals to itself.
 *When commenting on this article please include the permalink in your blog
post or tweet;
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On 21 April 2011 08:31, Phoebe Moore <pvm.doc at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm happy to do this Michel, when would you want it?
> Phoebe
> On 21 Apr 2011 05:42, "Michel Bauwens" <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > COuld someone with academic or research concerns discuss this on our
> blog?
> >
> >
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_twitters_terms_of_service_mi.php
> >
> > --
> > P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
> >
> > Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> > http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
> >
> > Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> > http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>



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