Dead Media/Live Nature

On October 31st I attended the first ASCA matinee with speaker Jussi Parikka from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His talk, titled “Dead Media/Live Nature: Media Ecologies of Animal Intensities,” focused on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab.

In preparation of his talk we were sent three readings:

1. Matthew Fuller (2007), “Art for Animals.“
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Charles Acland, Residual Media.¹
3. Garnet Hertz (2009), Dead Media Project

On the Future of New Media

Sterne describes how the “new” in new media consists of two types of newnewss for scholars:

In short, there are really two models of “newness” to which scholars of media change need to attend: (1) the “newness” of a medium with respect to other media, and (2) the so-called state of the art in design and function within a given medium.  Scholars, journalists and many others who write about computers have tended to collapse the second sense of newness into the first. (p. 18) [...] In a weird, recursive way, new media are “new” primarily with reference to themselves. (p. 19)

What constitutes the new is the halfwayness² and planned obsolescence of new media:

Combined with the “halfwayness” of most new media, planned obsolescence guarantees the continued recursive experience of digital media as “new”. The newness of new media is sustained by people continually disposing of the equipment they have in anticipation of something better. (p. 23)

I admit. I am one of those people. Last summer I replaced my fully functional 30 gig iPod video with an 16 gig iPod Touch because it offered me something more advanced and something better. Not so much storage wise but purely in functionality. I no longer see my iPod (Touch) as my iPod but as a small portable computer device (with tons of great and useless apps) that happens to play music. My other iPod is now obsolete, it lies in the corner of my room waiting to be used because it is still fully functional, yet I have discarded it as old and no longer useful. Yet, I do not throw it away. Sterne attributes this to the fact that equipment is expensive so we do not immediately throw it away after we have discarded our obsolete hardware. However, once we do, it becomes part of the junkyard of computers which leads to environmental problems. This is where Garnet Hertz’ Dead Media Project comes in.

Dead Media Project

In Hertz’ Dead Media Initiative he addresses the crossroads of media archeology and media ecology. The project links between themes of nature and technics and points to the material contexts of media. The Dead Media Project has three interests:

1. Repurposing media as a creative artistic project: it addresses the problems of electronic waste (gasses etc). A new temporality: cycle of consuming, human time of use value.
2. Extending media beyond individual use: Media as a community and artistic production as seen in do-it-yourself  and circuit bending practices. It aims to extend media to what is at hand.
3. Innovation through analysis of media history. It entails a shift of emphasis that looks as the usefulness of obsolescence: it offers us cheap research and design. The dynamics of media change.

Media as the death of nature

According to Parikka there are new waves of media studies: media archeology, media ecology and dead media studies. These semantics point to a crucial need to rethink media culture that takes into account the overlapping and boundaries of nature, technology and culture. Jussi Parikka addresses the animal forces within technology.

A medium is often described as a communication network, which is a broad definition. The Cross Talk project looks at new media spheres that pass through humans where the body becomes part of the media network. Its objective is to try to find processes in the natural world, for example bodies, as conduits for communications. What are natural technics that can function as carriers of signals or messages?

Relationality is the approxamity of relations. If you want to understand an media essemblage you have to look at its relations. What are the compositional dynamics that constitute media ecologies?³ Parikka is interested in the links between the themes of nature and technics and the material contexts of media. In his Spam Book he describes the Anomalies of Network Society which connects to his current research because it is a way of looking at media in ways it is not usually looked at. Nature has been seen as secondary signification, especially in the UK based strand of Cultural Studies which focusses on the politics of media. Nature is seen as merely  an affordance.

In a non-representational approach/analysis we could ask what kind of objects are circulating within media ecologies? Moving to the field of Software Studies, software may be used as the basis for the study of non-human autonomous agents. Examples of this type of research is focused on swarms (for example Galloway on Swarm Games) and object-oriented programming. These swarms are algorithmic insects and they are what produce second order effects.

The two strands of Media ecology (Neil Postman & Matthew Fuller) seem to be merging where, according to Parikka, media ecologies becomes less of a critique but more of a new strand.

The origins of the field of media ecology lie in the Toronto School and the New York School. In ‘What is Media Ecology?‘ Lance Strate⁴ describes it as

technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology. It is McLuhan Studies, orality–literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology.

Neil Postman, seen as the father of Media ecology, defines it as follows:⁵

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. [...]

It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments.

What Fuller and Parikka contribute to the Postman’s Media ecology is the increasing solidification and naturalization of the non-technological within our society. By doing so it would like to expand media studies’ agenda by borrowing from nature. Approprating and expanding our standardized uses and understandings by reconsidering what on earth have we have previously considered as media and why. Koert van Mensvoort examines this reconsideration of media and nature in the Next Nature blog. In the Next Nature publication Michiel Schwarz describes this reconfiguration of media ecology through media, technology and nature:

In the age where we have genetic engineering, artificial beaches, nature-identical food flavourings and virtual environments, what we traditionally used to view as ‘nature’ has now become an object of human design. ‘So-called nature’ has become a culturally-constructed nature in a mediated world. In this world, it is perhaps fitting that we now manipulate not only what we believed to be nature, but we happily also manipulate our images of nature. (..) What the images of multiple natures reveal to us, then, is the ‘new ecology’ in which we now find ourselves. A new ecology, where natures, technologies and media are all caught up together. (Schwarz)

1. Acland, Charles R. Residual media. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p 16-31.[↩]
2. As described in: Pacey, Arnold. The culture of technology. MIT Press, 1983.[↩]
3. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005: p. 131[↩]
4. Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.[↩]
5. Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970[↩]

This review of the Software Studies Lexicon was written in June 2007 after Matthew Fuller was kind enough to send me a sneak preview pre-publication copy. I sent the PDF of the Software Studies Review to Fuller to which he replied with some insightful remarks on my suggestion for a digital working environment, see update below.

Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2008.

334 pp. $28.00 USD. ISBN-10: 0262062747

Reviewed by Anne Helmond. June 2007, University of Amsterdam

Software Studies, a forthcoming lexicon edited by Matthew Fuller, consists of thirty-nine entries from mostly different authors. The title refers both to the object of study and the form of the project consisting of numerous short studies. Each of the “software studies” in the book stands on its own and Fuller celebrates the multi-disciplinary diversity of the authors. They come from different fields of study including art and design, literary theory, computation and free and open source software. Fuller has not gone as far as to attempt to start a new field of study but instead Software Studies calls for new theorizations of software from areas that “have not historically ‘owned’ software” such as media studies. The fields that are currently concerned with culture and media could contribute to a new approach to software with their critical perspectives on politics, society and matter.

Fuller states that he has chosen the form of a lexicon because it is provisional, scalable and contains pathways. It is provisional because it serves for the time being because software is not a static object and is therefore hard to pin down. Relations in and around software are constantly changing and a lexicon can serve as a temporary overview. Unlike a dictionary a lexicon is scalable and it does not strive to be complete and this incompleteness is “a virtue” according to Fuller.  The entries can be seen as different pathways into software that do not strive to depict a whole. Connections between these pathways are made by the various authors but can also be constituted by the reader itself. In short, both software studies and the Software Studies lexicon can be seen as a specific approach whereby each entry is a pathway into thinking about software.

This approach does not seem to have a shared methodology except for creating new pathways into software. This could be due to the different backgrounds of the authors who all contribute to the discourse of software studies from their own perspective and paradigm. This is both the strength and weakness of Software Studies: at times the lexicon seems uneven with an overemphasis on computing which is a neglected aspect of software according to Fuller. However, in order to bring back this neglected aspect too many entries fall in the lexicon back on Turing et. al.

Software Studies builds on Fuller’s previous works Behind the Blip and, to a lesser extent, Media Ecologies. Behind the Blip consists of several essays on the topic of the culture of software. In the opening essay of Behind the Blip Fuller argues for a “software criticism” that moves authors writing about computers away from the performance of software towards a more critical approach. This new critical approach is not concerned with detailing the functionality of a particular piece of software but is rather concerned with the question how software consists of different elements that are embedded in a dynamic web of relations.

An excellent example of this critical approach is the essay ‘It Looks Like You Are Writing A  Letter’ that critiques the popular word-processing software Microsoft Word revealing that “software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used.” Fuller argues that software can be seen as a synthesis, a form of amalgamation or assemblage, of different layers that do not imply a static whole. This dynamic synthesis is also the subject of Fuller’s book Media Ecologies that uses a materialistic approach to identify three forces of objects in media ecologies: affordances, material substrates and memes. In a sense, software is described as having a vitality; it derives its energy from these forces that cause collision, (dis)connection and interaction underwriting their unstable and dynamic nature.

Lev Manovich previously addressed the importance of studying software in The Language of New Media in 2001. He states that media have become programmable and that we need a new field of study to address the issues that arise from this turn in our culture. Not only has software quietly penetrated our daily life but it has also become invisible. The ubiquity and so-called transparency of software renders it invisible but at the same time it points out the importance of studying it. Manovich has studied software from a formalist approach by taking terms and categories from computer science and applying them to new media that have become programmable.  According to Manovich five principles distinguish new media from the older media  namely, numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding (27-48). These principles point to the relation that new media and software have with code.

Adrian Mackenzie takes issue with Manovich with an interesting take on code and software in Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (2006) and notes that software is a very mutable object that is entangled in a web of relations. Mackenzie sees software as a social object and process that is intrinsically linked to code as a material and practice. He points to the problems of Manovich’s formal analysis because it abstracts software from practices and contexts surrounding coding and reduces it to “relations and operations (such as sorting, comparing, copying, removing) on items of data.” (Mackenzie 2006) These relations and operations are seen as quite stable forms and are often directly transferred from the field of computer science. Instead of abstracting and formalizing software Mackenzie argues for an ontology of software that deals with its mutability. This mutability arises from the agential relations indexed by code of the social web that software weaves. Mackenzie, as one of the authors of the Software Studies lexicon, contributes to software studies by arguing that we should render software visible and notice the agency it provides, generates and distributes:

At stake here is an account of software as a highly involuted, historically media-specific distribution of agency. This account diverges from a general sociology of technology in highlighting the historical, material specificity of code as a labile, shifting nexus of relations, forms and practices. It regards software formally as a set of permutable distributions of agency between people, machines and contemporary symbolic environments carried as code. Code itself is structured as a distribution of agency. (Mackenzie, 19)

So what is next for the field of software studies? After having finished reading Software Studies it has not become quite clear what is to be done since it does not provide a unified approach or methodology. However, the lexicon is an excellent starting point for those who wish to be introduced into software studies. But what about those who wish to contribute? Even though a lexicon is provisional, scalable and offers pathways, in a printed form it still implies some kind of a finished whole. Software as a shifting nexus of relations is in a constant flux and pathways into software may disappear, change or be added. The print form is not fit to adjust to such changes because once the text has been printed there is no way to adjust it. Revising is a possible solution for this problem. Recently, the famous lexicon Keywords by Raymond Williams has been revised by several editors resulting in New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society. Original entries of the lexicon were updated and new entries were added twenty five years after the original publication.

A more fitting solution for Software Studies would be supplying a digital environment in which changes in entries can be made without losing the original entry and can be tracked. Such environments are currently known as wikis which might be an ideal work form for software studies. Like software, wikis are often seen as a shifting nexus of relations that contain provisional, scalable pathways into other topics. A wiki, or another hypertextual environment might render the different pathways into software and their connections more visible thus expanding the knowledge about software and its relations. To perceive a better understanding of software we need to create more pathways. Would software studies benefit from using software to create these pathways and write about its studies?

References

Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn, USA: Autonomedia, 2003.
Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. New York, USA: Peter Lang Pub Inc., 2006.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2002.

UPDATE
Matthew Fuller replied to my critique on the somewhat stale format of the book in contrast to a wiki that a wiki tends to homogenize the authors’ voices. On top of that academic publishing in the form of a book is a good way to ‘register’ ideas within a certain set of discourses embedded in the book. During the SoftWhere 2008: Software Studies Strategy Round-Table Doug Sery from MIT Press announced that they were interested in publishing a series and MIT Press officially approved the Software Studies book series in July 2008.

While I was in San Diego in May at the Software Studies Institute the first bits of a digital collaborative working ground were being built. The goal is to make a Software Studies portal where current research is on display, to find researchers and to bring researchers together. This portal is still “under construction” but anything tagged with ‘software_studies’ will very likely be picked up in the near future.