Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (review)

"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 Fuller's 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 complexity—far 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 have been largely responsible for disseminating information about the biological domains, presenting us with the shape of an image we now refer to as ecology—it enables us "to think through the patterns of mutualism, dependency, fuelling, parasitism, etc. in a system, and between overlapping systems," as the Australian 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, web sites 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 Ecologies: Materialist 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 1970s—from the publication Radical Software's 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 web sites test our civil and social loyalties by enabling interaction with surveillance cameras hijacked off the Internet. Fuller's tone is agitational rather than methodological. The pitch builds upon selected cultural, political and philosophical treatises—from Nietzsche through Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1938) to Foucault, Negri and 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 such as 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 1970s 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. Gibson's views about technology driving cultural change being echoed where frameworks and affordances provide for consumers and hackers opportunity to patch their gadgets, from which emerge meaningful "dimensions of relationality." Braced between the representation of materiality in Hilliard's 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...