MEDIA ECOLOGIES: MATERIALIST ENERGIES IN ART AND TECHNOCULTURE

This title offers a dirty materialist ride through the media cultures of pirate radio, photography, the Internet, media art, cultural evolution, and surveillance. 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. Arguing that the only wayto find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies. Among them are contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; arange of compelling interpretations of new media works; 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 reference, 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.