<nettime-ann> The Fibreculture Journal 17—Unnatural Ecologies, edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka

[Andrew Murphie <andrew.murphie@gmail.com>]

.
Unnatural Ecologies

http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/
http://fibreculturejournal.org/

many
 thanks to Mat Wall-Smith, the Journal Manager, who has now enabled pdf 
and epub downloads of all articles and of the whole issue in file.

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We are pleased to launch issue 17 of the Fibreculture Journal—Unnatural Ecologies, edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka

FCJ-114 Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Michael Goddard 

FCJ-115 Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Olga Goriunova

FCJ-116 Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Jussi Parikka 

FCJ-117 Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matteo Pasquinelli 

FCJ-118 Faulty Theory
Matthew Fuller

FCJ-119 Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production
Phoebe Moore

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. (more...)

http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/

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The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal, first published in 2003 to explore the issues and ideas of concern to both the Fibreculture network.

The Fibreculture Journal now serves wider social formations across the international community of those thinking critically about, and working with, contemporary digital and networked media.

The Fibreculture Journal has an international Editorial Board and Committee.

In 2008, the Fibreculture Journal became a part of the Open Humanities Press , a key initiative in the development of the Open Access journal community.

The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the 
debate and discussions concerning a wide range of topics of interest. 
These include the social and cultural contexts, philosophy and politics 
of contemporary media technologies and events, with a special emphasis 
on the ongoing social, technical and conceptual transitions involved.


-- 

"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What he really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North Whitehead

Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor
School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052
Editor - The Fibreculture Journal http://fibreculturejournal.org/>

web: http://www.andrewmurphie.org/  http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/

fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie@unsw.edu.au

room 311H, Webster Building
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