[Leonardo/ISAST Network] Media Ecologies by Matthew Fuller now available from Leonardo Book Series

[Leonardo/ISAST]

NOW AVAILABLE from LEONARDO BOOK SERIES and MIT PRESS

MEDIA ECOLOGIES: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture
by Matthew Fuller

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 Félix Guattari (and his "serial collaborator"
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."

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Series please visit the Leonardo Book Series website at: http://lbs.mit.edu

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