New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I am here referring to artist Mark Napier's statement, quoted in Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, "The Haptic Interface: On Signal Transmissions and Events, " in Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, ed. Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2011), 57–8. 2. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) ; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) ; Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). The term "German Media Theory" itself is quite unsuccesful as it suggest a too homonegeous and unified national media theoretical discourse. 3. Kittler, quoted in Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, "Introduction, " in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, xiv. 4. Wolfgang Hagen, Das Radio: Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks in Deutschland und der USA (Munich: Fink, 2005), xvii. 5. Besides an institutional link, such writers often elaborate on the ontological and epistemological ground that physics and aesthetics share in the age of technical media. A good example is Bernard Siegert, who elaborates what we here could call a grounding of new materialism of the aesthetico-technical of new materialism: "Like physics, aesthetics is a science whose primary object is signals, the physical materiality of signs. " "Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies, " trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Grey Room 29 (Fall 2007): 40. 6. For a recent elaboration of the different cybernetic traditions in the United Kingdom, see Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010). 7. See, for instance, Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto, 2004). 8. Adrian Mackenzie, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010) ; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) ; Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009) ; Barbara Bolt and Estelle Barrett, ed. , Carnal Knowledge: Towards a "New Materialism" through the Arts (London: IB Tauris, forthcoming 2011) ; and Milla Tiainen, "Corporeal Forces, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing, and Subjectivity, " in Sonic Interventions, ed. Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith, and Marijke de Valck (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 147–67. 9. In addition to the already-mentioned Kittler's works, see for instance, Wolfgang Ernst, Archives, Media and Diagrammatics of Cultural Memory, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012). 10. Speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy also address similar themes concerning matter but, curiously, that discussion has not overlapped much with material feminisms of, for instance, Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti. See Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, ed. , The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re. press, 2011). On some general epistemological points concerning new materialism, see Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn, "The Transversality of New Materialism, " Women: A Cultural Review 21, no. 2 (2010): 167–85. 11. Sean Cubitt, "The Raster Screen and Database Economy" (lecture, Trust, Identity Privacy and Security in Digital Culture conference, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and Chelmsford, UK, September 10, 2009), http: //barney. inspire. anglia. ac. uk/inspireⱼ/ds1. html (accessed September 18, 2011). 12. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006) ; see also Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka, ed. , Media Ecology special issue, Fibreculture 17 (2011), http: //seventeen. fibreculturejournal. org/. 13. Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 14. Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method, " Leonardo 45 (forthcoming 2012). 15. Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2011). 16. David M. Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 95–6. 17. Friedrich A. Kittler, "There is No Software, " in Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts, 1997), 147–55. 18. Martin Howse (MicroResearchlab) performed live "data carvery" as a form of digital archaeology in a radio performance on the Berlin Reboot-station. Martin Howse, Danja Vassiliev, and Gordo Savicic, "Substrat Radio #2 Data Carvery, " reboot. fm, August 14, 2011, http: //reboot. fm/2011/08/14/substrat-radio-2-data-carvery/ (accessed September 5, 2011). In terms of academic and cultural heritage methodologies, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). 19. Ned Rossiter, "Translating the Indifference of Communication: Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China, " International Review of Information Ethics, 11 (October 2009): 36–44, http: //www. i-r-i-e. net/inhalt/011/011-full. pdf (accessed September 18, 2011). 20. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. Mark B. N. Hansen has referred to the need to develop a more process-based media studies orientation, instead of the so far emphasized object-based media studies. "Delimination of Life—Affective Bodies and Biomedia, " (keynote conversation, transmediale. 11 Conference, Berlin, 6 February 2011). 21. See Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2009), 95–9. 22. In a related manner, YoHa (Matsuko Yokokoji and Graham Harwood) address—in their artistic project, Coal Fired Computing (UK: 2010, http: //yoha. co. uk/cfc) —fossil-reliant energy production and especially computer power, as well as the health impacts for coal miners. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJussi ParikkaJussi Parikka is Reader in Media and The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (with Tony D. Sampson, Hampton Press, 2009) —insects and the biophilosophy of digital culture—Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) ; the special issue on Media Ecology for Fibreculture (2011) ; and MediaNatures (online edited book, 2011) —as well as on media archaeological theory and methods—Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (with Erkki Huhtamo, University of California Press, 2011) and What is Media Archaeology? (Polity Press, forthcoming 2012). In addition, he is the editor of a collection of Wolfgang Ernst's writings, Archives, Media and Diagrammatics of Cultural Memory (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012). Blog: http: //www. jussiparikka. net