Fibreculture #17: unnatural ecologies
From the Editorial: “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, 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…” Continue here.
Also in this issue:
Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Michael Goddard
Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Olga Goriunova
Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Jussi Parikka
Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matteo Pasquinelli
Faulty Theory
Matthew Fuller
Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production
Phoebe Moore
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