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| − | ==Definitions==
| + | #REDIRECT [[:Category:Ecology]] |
| − | ===Media ecologies===
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| − | * <blockquote>"Media ecology is a very slippery term. It is often used to refer to both an
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| − | interlaced topological analysis of media objects, as an environ, as well as an
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| − | accounting of their function. It can also be an address of the materiality and
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| − | immateriality of media objects, devices, and systems in terms of their form as
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| − | both pattern and presence including the relative nature of their function. The
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| − | term also refers to the multiplicity of meanings associative to the constituent
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| − | binding relations of information objects contained within the ecology, its
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| − | language. And, as Matthew Fuller illuminates, media ecology is also a descriptor
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| − | of the parallel histories and affordances of context. Within the
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| − | multiplicities of these ecologies, complexity reigns supreme. Nonlinear, selforganizational,
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| − | and transpositional systems behavior combine autopoietically
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| − | at the intersection of media collisions.<br>
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| − | Complementing Manuel De Landa’s reading of the ''phase space'' model and
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| − | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s poetics of the ''machinic phylum'', Fuller
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| − | directs our attention toward aesthetics of layering composed of multiple
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| − | relations of media dimensionality. These are dimensionalities operating as
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| − | self-referencing structures that cooperate to produce something in excess of
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| − | themselves and emerge in new structures of political, material, and aesthetic
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| − | combination." (from Joel Slayton's foreword to Matt Fuller's ''Media Ecologies'')</blockquote>
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| − | * "The term ''media ecology'' is used and in circulation in a number of ways.
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| − | The term is chosen here because this multiple use turns it into a crossroads.
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| − | Butting these two words up to each other produces a conjunction of two variables
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| − | that are always busy with meaning. Their dynamism, however, always
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| − | arises out of concrete conditions. The virtuality of such conditions, their possible
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| − | reinvention or alternate state, their pregnancy with change and interre-
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| − | lation, is as deeply implied in this concreteness as much as it can be said to
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| − | be subject to definition.<br>
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| − | The term is ambiguous, too, given its number of different current uses.
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| − | That these uses exist, that the present work does not attempt to find a “new”
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| − | title for itself, is intended to enhance the way in which this book uses preexisting
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| − | objects as being more loaded than the new and innocent, and hence
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| − | potentially more powerful when dimensions of relationality that are virtual to
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| − | them (but that perhaps remain hidden) are brought to the fore or potentiated.
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| − | It is not the intention of this book to spend its entire course fidgeting with
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| − | a possible hermeneutics of the term, but a brief mapping of its concurrent
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| − | uses will usefully serve to locate the areas of concern here.
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| − | “Media ecology,” or more often “information ecology,”4 is deployed as a
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| − | euphemism for the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in
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| − | computer-supported collaborative work. Commonly, it is used as a saccharine
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| − | term for the “natural” structuring of the microscopic to macroscopic dimensions
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| − | of class composition and command in a workforce. On the one hand,
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| − | this is done on a mundane level, such as in the ordering and management of
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| − | reception staff within an organization, making sure they have the location,
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| − | communications filter-rating, and availability of all other staff at their fingertips.
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| − | Of keen interest too in such contexts is how information flows are
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| − | routed within an organization. So the term often also implies an interrelationship
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| − | with knowledge and time management processes, intellectual
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| − | property regimes, database and software design, content control, access
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| − | structuring, metadata, archiving, and the use and generation of new document
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| − | and information types. A third, and related current is how auditing
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| − | processes and “quality control” extend through informationalization into
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| − | greater parts of contemporary work-patterns. In other words, the terms “media
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| − | ecology” and “information ecology” are highly susceptible to interpretation as
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| − | part of the jargon effluvia of the early twenty-first century. Underlying these
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| − | terms, however, are key discussions about the development, contestation, and
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| − | invention of life in the present day. Some of these issues will be discussed here,
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| − | but somewhat at a tangent to the refrain of life, as a subset of a larger enterprise
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| − | opportunity in which they are often found.<br>
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| − | In a related sense, in that there is something of a shared predisposition to
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| − | an uncomplicated but rather more spiritually troubled technological determinism,
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| − | is another use of the term by a current surrounding media commentor
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| − | and educationalist Neil Postman.5 Here, “media ecology” describes a kind of
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| − | environmentalism: using a study of media to sustain a relatively stable notion
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| − | of human culture. The intellectual background of this current includes
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| − | Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and Jacques
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| − | Ellul—a vivid set of resources. Here, “ecology” is more usually replaced with
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| − | the term “environment” or is used as a cognate term where the fundamental
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| − | difference between the two concepts is glossed over. Echoing differences in
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| − | life sciences and in various Green political movements, “environmentalism”
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| − | possesses a sustaining vision of the human and wants to make the world safe
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| − | for it. Such environmentalism also often suggests that there has passed, or that
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| − | there will be reached, a state of equilibrium: that there is a resilient and harmonic
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| − | balance to be achieved with some ingenious and beneficent mix of
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| − | media. Ecologists focus rather more on dynamic systems in which any one
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| − | part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those connections, and
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| − | always variable, such that it can be regarded as a pattern rather than simply
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| − | as an object. At times there is certainly an overlap of interests between this
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| − | book and this current, particularly in attempts to investigate how media can
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| − | be said to have certain kinds of causality. However, as with the businessoriented
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| − | discussions of media and information management, much of the work
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| − | in this second current is rather too often symptomatic of other, more fundamental
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| − | shifts in cultural modes: how much longer until the ever-awaited fall
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| − | of the book? Instead of providing a sing-along chorus to these changes, as the
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| − | first current does for those parts of life falling under the regime of economics,
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| − | the latter seeks too often only to trace them with the properly cultivated
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| − | kind of detached horror. Their conceptual resources, however, have more to
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| − | offer.<br>
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| − | A third strand of use of the term is discernible in some of the most interesting
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| − | parts of literary studies in recent decades in, for instance, the writings
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| − | of N. Katherine Hayles,6 Friedrich Kittler,7 and others such as the critic and
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| − | editor Joseph Tabbi.8 These representatives of a thread of study in which literature
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| − | becomes a part of a subset of media, and thus of discursive storage,
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| − | calculation, and transmission systems, have fundamental insights to offer.
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| − | Such work makes electronic or code-based logical composition and a developed
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| − | theorization of interaction come into play with cultural analysis and production.
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| − | Of particular use too is such work’s discussion of domains usually
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| − | roped off as science, its varied histories and philosophies. Such work also often
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| − | serves to complicate and open up the possibilities to be found in the second
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| − | thread. The interrelation of Kittler and McLuhan—despite the former’s
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| − | amused anticipation of the moment when man is occluded and finally ignored
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| − | by his “extensions”—is clear, for instance.9 Where these thinkers gain perceptual
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| − | and methodological power is in the introduction of, broadly speaking,
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| − | poststructuralist concerns to the fundamentally humanistic, or even
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| − | intrinsically religious, concerns of the “environmental” approach. It must be
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| − | said, however, that here the specific term “media ecologies” is used largely
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| − | either as an aside, or more precisely as something already accessible as a known
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| − | object of reference. The context of this writing is to take this named thing,
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| − | to take advantages of this reference in circulation, a scrap of phrase or conceptwrapper,
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| − | and to make use of it, but also to test it and, one hopes, to extend
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| − | its precision.<br>
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| − | A key reference in doing so will be to make use of a sense in which the
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| − | term ecology has also been extended in texts by Félix Guattari working among
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| − | social movements that have themselves made such links. It will be clear
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| − | from a scan of this book that Guattari, his serial collaborator Gilles Deleuze,
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| − | as well as writers who have made their own uses of their work, such as Manuel
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| − | De Landa and Howard Slater,10 provide a persistent thread of reference.
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| − | Guattari himself derives a great deal of conceptual ground from the cybernetician
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| − | and anthropologist Gregory Bateson.11 Guattari’s use of the term
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| − | ecology is worth noting here, first, because the stakes he assigns to media are
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| − | rightly perceived as being profoundly political or ethico-aesthetic at all scales.
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| − | Aligning such political processes with creative powers of invention that
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| − | demand “laboratories of thought and experimentation for future forms of
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| − | subjectivation”12 also poses a demand for the inventive rigor with which
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| − | life among media must be taken up. Equally, Guattari’s repeated linkage
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| − | and cross-fertilization of the three modes, “mental,” “natural,” and “social” of
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| − | ecology13 within “ecosophy”14 provides insight into the way that any of these
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| − | or other modes of an ecology always demand carrying over into another mode,
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| − | another universe of reference, and always another, in order for these laboratories,
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| − | whether in texts, persons, movements, or at other scales, to have any
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| − | function."<br>
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| − | (from Matt Fuller's introduction to his ''Media Ecologies'')
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| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ==Literature==
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| − | * [[Matthew Fuller]], ''Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture'', 2005 [http://burundi.sk/monoskop/log/?p=56 full book]
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| − | * Armstrong, Keith M. (2008) "'Grounded media' : expanding the scope of ecological art practices within new media arts culture." ''Media-Space Journal'' (1 - New Media Art - Past, Present, Futures). [http://eprints.qut.edu.au/8802/1/c8802.pdf]
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| − | * Nohra Corredor, "What is Ecological Video Art?" (2006) [http://www.ecologicalart.org/ecvidart.html]
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| − | * Sam Bower, "A Profusion of Terms" [http://www.greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=306]
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| − | | |
| − | ==Resources==
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| − | * [[Stephen Wilson]], art projects categorised under (biological aspects of) "Ecology" [http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/wilson.artlinks2.bio.html] and "Natural Phenomena - Non-linear Dynamic Systems, Water, Weather, Solar Energy, Geology, Mechanical Motion" [http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/wilson.artlinks2.physics.html]
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| − | * http://www.greenmuseum.org/ - Greenmuseum.org uses "environmental art" as an umbrella term to encompass "eco-art" / "ecological art", "ecoventions", "land art", "earth art", "earthworks", "art in nature" and even a few other less-common terms.
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| − | * Furtherfield Media Art Ecologies, [http://www.furtherfield.org/mediaartecologies.php]
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