Media EcologiesMaterialist
Energies in Art and Technoculture
by Matthew Fuller
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005
240 pp., illus. 11 b/w. Trade, $34.95
ISBN: 0-262-062-06247-X.
Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
legart@ozemail.com.au
Art, as much as science, often attempts
to put an enclosure around a sequence,
a process, in order to isolate it as material
to be inspected in a certain way, as distinct.
Name a system, exhaust its permutations."
Aphorisms of this kind pepper Matthew
Fullers account of the interplay
of expressive electronic media forms through
the period of Millennial change for creative
people, both producers and audiences.
Characteristically, the statement can
be taken to be both a pungent critique
and benign observation. As critique, it
suggests practitioners and researchers
cynically delineate territory through
which they career for their individual
professional and economic benefit. As
an observation, it is a reasonable description
of the approach so many, the altruistic
together with the avaricious, take to
dealing with complexityfar
better, perhaps, to deal with a part of
the world in depth than drown in unrelated
details.
Ecological systems of biological interdependency
are less than 50 years old in the public
mind during which time we have experienced
the impact of systems of information and
communications technology (ICT). Indeed
radio and television has been largely
responsible for disseminating information
about the biological domains, presenting
us with the shape ofan image we now refer
to as ecologyit enables us
". . . to think through the patterns of
mutualism, dependency, fuelling, parasitism,
etc. in a system, and between overlapping
systems . . . " as the Australia publisher,
Keith Gallasch, wrote recently. "Audiences
eager for arts information and criticism
increasingly seek alternatives to a challenged
mass media, whether in street papers,
magazines, websites or blogs, and above
all, in combinations of these. A decade
ago the commercial media mocked prophets
who forecast a participatory rather than
a passive audience in the near future.
How wrong they were."
Media EcologiesMaterialist
Energies in Art and Technoculture
traces the shifts, developments, dead-ends,
and breakthroughs in this dynamic area
of studio, laboratory, and street-culture
activity. It develops from previous energies
of the 1970sfrom Radical Software
publications use of the term, media
ecology; through exploring the early formal
photographic work of the artist, John
Hilliard; to the more recent work of Heath
Bunting, whose websites test our civil
and social loyalties by enabling interaction
with surveillance cameras, high-jacked
off the internet. Fullers tone is
agitational rather than methodological.
The pitch builds upon selected works of
cultural, political, and philosophical
treatisefrom Nietzsche through
Alfred North Whiteheads Science
and the Modern World (1938), to Foucault,
Negri, Deleuze and Guattari.
The image of the itinerant metallurgist,
moving to where the materials, the conditions
and the needs, are situated, the machinic
phylum of A Thousand Plateaus,
". . . allows thought to enter a thicker
relationship with practice, with materials
of expression, their constitution of effect."
Materials like the low-power FM transmitter,
used (illegally) in districts of London
as a part of hip-hop culture, are tempered
with the more mundane official documents
that trace the management of a key material
of modernity, radio waves, (again the
subject of 70s activism for community-based
radio and television). The machinic tools
of turntable and microphone, of voice
and drugs, the issues of redundancy and
entropy bent out of shape to produce heard
stuff, are crafted through parts of the
text into a prose refracting the central
issues of cultural traction. Reflection
by the reader is a requirement here, as
this is no quickly absorbed account. Discussion
of mobile (phone) cultures moves back
into more familiar range with J.J. Gibsons
views about technology driving cultural
change being echoed where frameworks and
affordances provide for consumers and
hackers opportunity to patch their gadgets
from which emerges meaningful dimensions
of relationality. Braced between
the representation of materiality in Hilliards
choreographed A Camera Recording Its
Own Condition (7 apertures, 10 speeds,
2 mirrors) and the materiality of what
is heard when a microphone and loudspeaker
are in close proximity is the full range
of vectored expression between affirmation
and interference, autopoiesis and intervention.
In The Switch, a community-based
installation by Jakob Jakobson, the street
lighting in a cul-de-sac in Denmark involved
the 40 households in determining each
night at what point the lighting would
be switched on or off. What flowed was
unpredictable.
Less so the rhetoric of BITRadio data
interventions over WNYC at the WEF. This
is straightforward reading, but not so
the penultimate, Seams, Memes, and
Flecks of Identity. Covering boundaries,
variable and events, it is also the longest
chapter, zipping between ideas and artefacts
at a breathless rate: Dawkins to packet-switching;
Chaosmosis to Neue Slowenische Kunst collective;
TCP/IP to A Media Art (Manifesto) from
the 60s; Jennicam to Albert Speer. Unlike
Sgt Pepper, however, Fuller keeps our
gaze directed at the threatening oppressive
backdrop, always changing but always presentthen
the camps of totalitarianism, now the
interned refugees and terror suspects.
And for the rest of us, "In the meantime,
there are plenty of forms to fill in,
some buttons to press", some faxes to
send. The short final chapter deepens
the auto-reflective stance taken by the
writer, seemingly conscious that the ride
has been a demanding one though determined
to resist the temptation to prescribe
or predict progressionapart
from a belief in a reframed art practice
having the potential to take a lead in
the intense process of reinvention, of
orders and relationalities of the social,
the material and the imagination.
Fuller moves to extract essences from
the phenomena encountered to make transitions
more visible between them, highlighting
tendencies, accenting flow. The Footnotes
and Bibliography are copious, stretching
to 100 pages, are fascinating and vital
for readers, particularly post-graduate
students who wish to follow up some of
the more obscure links proposed. A glossary
of terms would have been useful and maybe
just one more check for typos and syntax.
Finally, though published in the USA,
would not Leonardo promote its
internationalist stance further by respecting
the spelling conventions of Fullers
English domicile, in another valuable
addition to this bravely conceived and
beautifully designed series.