Apparatus theory of media á la (or in the wake of) Karen Barad

Reading through Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway is a rewarding but time-consuming event. A very durational event, at least for me. Summer is usually the time of metaphysics and other stuff that cannot be subsumed in the 1 hour slots one has between teaching etc. during term time; hence, I have ended often carrying Whitehead, Simondon and now Barad with me to the beach and other places more suitable for Ruth Rendell’s etc.

Writing the draft version of my text for Fibreculture Media Ecologies-issue and reading Barad at the same time produced this very short, but I think fascinating realisation; what Barad says about the apparatus in quantum theory and specifically Nils Bohr’s philosophy of quantum theory is actually something I try to touch in thinking through what media is in the text ( a certain kind of milieu theory of media). In short, Barad outlines Bohr’s stance how practices embody theories and more dynamically, how practices are specific practices in time that enact and differentiate theories in their work. In this context, Barad produces this six-part summary of what apparatuses are – especially in the context of physical measurements and laboratory work but something I would suggest you to read as media theory as well. In other words, replace in the text below quoted from Barad (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007, p. 146) every word “apparatus” with “media” – I find it a very good and material-dynamic way to understand the ontology of media technologies.

“1) apparatuses are specific material-discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that embody human concepts and take measurements); 2) apparatuses produce differences that matter—they are boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced; 3) apparatuses are material configurations/dynamic reconfigurings of the world; 4) apparatuses are themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-activity of the world); 5) apparatuses have no intrinsic boundaries but are open-ended practices; and 6) apparatuses are not located in the world but are material configurations and reconfigurings of the world that re(con)figure spatiality and temporality as well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics (i.e. they do not exist as static structures, nor do they merely unfold or evolve in space and time).”

Of course, the full impact of this idea is hard to grasp outside the context of Barad’s intriguing book. And I am sure she would not mind my appropriation of her ideas to media theory as well; after all, she herself is reading quantum theory as offering the key challenges towards rethinking key notions of subjectivity, agency, causality, etc. in feminist cultural theory. (And anyway, reading laboratory apparatuses etc. in the context of media history has been done before anyway, from Jonathan Crary to Henning Schmidgen etc.)

This idea offers a fascinating “new apparatus theory” of media – that differs from what is usually referred to as apparatus approaches in film studies.

Summer readings

Following Steven Shaviro’s and others’ lead, here is a brief summary of my summer’s reading list. Of course, this is more about good intensions, but in any way, represents some of the stuff I need to be catching up with. A painful reminder of things that should have been read ages ago. So read this post as masochism of sorts.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Duke 2007)
- such a crucial thinker for neomaterialist cultural analysis, one cannot neglect this book that ties Bohr’s quantum physics with feminist theory. She comes up with such great, and useful concepts as “agential realism” which I believe give tools to both science studies as well as posthuman theory. To quote: “… matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than a property of things.” (35).

Joanna Zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT 2009)
- two reasons: going to Sussex Biodigital Lives conference soon, and wanted to catch up what Zylinska is saying in her new book; then doing a review of it for Leonardo Reviews. Zylinska offers a deeply ontologically rooted ideas concerning bioethics, and extends its regime from only medicine and the biodigital to such practices as blogging and phenomena such as make-up shows. Biopolitics is a parallel theme to bioethics, claims the book. Interestingly, the book tries to come up with Levinas something new, although claiming sympathy to Deleuzian approaches. Indeed, it seems that she shares a lot in this sense with some of Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia-ideas.

Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minnesota, 2004)
- a book I should have read a long time ago, but now trying to scan it through in its entirety, again partly because of the Sussex event. I think Thacker’s idea of biomedia as “enabling certain types of data to be mobilized across different media” – i.e. as a concept of mediation that does not lose sight of the material basis of such encodings and decodings is great also for a wider reconsideration of the agenda of media studies (media studies as the potentially key discipline to understand various exchanges happening across scales from science and technology to visual culture and for example science fiction).

Axel Volmar (ed.), Zeitkritische Medien (Kadmos 2009)
- a book that sums up many of the interest in Berlin media studies concerning “time critical media.” It looks like an excellent book that argues for the centrality of time as both an epistemological perspective for media studies and as an ontologically organizing principle for modern technical media culture. This is the stuff what Wolfgang Ernst is always on about (and for a good reason), and where the macrotemporal durations inspected by media archaeology could find a new ground in microtemporal modulations of technical media.

Charles Stross, Accelerando
- His Atrocity Archives was a bit of a disappointment (except for the excellent afterwords), but this one, a gift and a recommendation from Michael Goddard, is much more promising after 150 pages. Much more about political economy of ultra-technological culture. And hey, it’s got lobsters uploaded to computer networks, what more could you expect? I just wish I had read the lobster bits before submitting my Insect Media book to the publisher.

Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond (Peter Lang, 2008)
- well, this is just one of the books you need to read to keep up with relevant social media stuff. Probably the best summarizing book on social media topics, something I should have digested a while ago.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes (MIT 2009)
- as with Barad, this connects with my interests in neomaterialist modes of analysing culture and arts. I have read some chapters, but I will try to go through the remaining as well. It’s an important book, and hopefully provides such a tool box that helps to articulate themes of event, relationality and movement not only in terms of dancing bodies but also e.g. such non-human topics I am working on as media ecologies. Having said that, we are just finishing an article on contemporary dance, movement and biopolitics, and it touches closely Manning’s themes. The article is on Tero Saarinen’s magnificent collaboration with Marita Liulia: Hunt.

Sven Spieker, The Big Archive (MIT Press)
- actually, just finished reading this but wanted to include it here because I liked it so much. In the midst of finishing the book on Media Archaeology, this spurred new ideas and summed some thoughts I also had. It focuses on the appropriation of the archive and other bureaucratic modes of data management with artistic methodologies, placing a lot of emphasis on early 20th century avant-garde. To my taste, it is a really good book not only on the artistic projects but on the “archival principle” of modernity in general. It touches on some of the key questions of 19th century archive and its change during 20th century. Where it stops is the digital; would have been interesting to look at the notion of the archive/database in the digital networked era through e.g. net art pieces.

Then there are other stuff that I really hope I can glance through, such as Michelle Hennings Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (in connection to a funding bid we have submitted with Robin Boast). Also, bubbling under so to speak is a something I ordered, by Gherasim Luca, something I really look forward as my holiday treat, but more on that later….

The Infantile Star

I have never in any way really cared for Michael Jackson's music, so the news of his death does not move me too much. I tried to gather an interest in him from a media studies perspective – he is after all perhaps one of the last big actualisations of the Disney era of sorts; a half-imaginated, half-real zombie of sorts that seemed to live most of his last years in a weird haze world. What was incidental of some of the reports / review articles of him after his death (reading some newspapers in Berlin), was the reference to his status as a victim of sorts. He was written in some articles as the not-completely-grown-up that was continuously struggling with relationships and his status as a public character. Of course, such ideas hit the mark all too well – and this is the status he wanted to give himself as well. All the fantasies of the boy who did not grow up, the Peter Pan, the infantile work now in his favor to create a polished picture that is not ready to discuss his possible pedophilia.

Indeed, describing him in terms of infantility is I believe the point and ranges from his music (all the high pitched screams, or his so soft talking voice, almost beyond language, infantile) and his public persona. It goes as far as hinting towards a legal status as well, which is interesting. Jackson is one of the first and last great Baudrillard-kind of characters of simulacra that do not seem completely real but governed by the logic of simulacra – a logic of signs floating around in a world of media cultural capitalism of sorts. In Jackson, this reached certain corporeality through his on-going metamorphosis and the years long media discussion concerning his nose and skin. What do we remember of him but those two things? The mutilated nose and the oh-too-white skin? Its emblematic of the Disney world as well, the urge for whiteness present in so many implicitly racist Disney narratives. Jackson the media persona at least shows the political contexts of any simulacra that in this case territorialized very concretely on issues of race and gender. Yet, such issues are accessible through a sans langue of the infantile with the intensities of the skin color, the voice, the fragility rather than a clear language-orientated grid of representation. No signifiers and signifieds, but intensities and bodies. In this sense Jackson shares something with Marilyn Monroe, as Milla reminded me; Marilyn also as a Hollywood-infantility according to some critics, her babylike face, infantile sexuality present in her soft voice that as if struggled to be heard at all, almost child-like

The Finnish media theorist Jukka Sihvonen pointed towards such a culture of infantility in his book on media education that I alas do not have at hand. I am sure it would inspire some really good points about our media culture as one of infantility more widely. Have to pick up the book when I get back to Cambridge just to remind myself of his arguments, which place the whole idea of “media education” in the important context of contemporary media in a post-enlightenment condition.

Media Ecologies: Extending Media Studies

I have been occupied trying to think through the notion of media ecologies in the wake of Matthew Fuller's great work of the same name. I am trying to work through ex-Mongrel members' Eco Media project and also referencing Garnet Hertz's Dead Media project where both projects extend media ecologies to media archaeological ideas. The idea is to say how especially Eco Media project's methodologies are practical transversal tools to bring media natural and media technological into proximity -- or well, actually saying that they were never apart. Working through the art projects and via Simondon, Guattari and others, at the moment these three themes sum up what I am trying to say (this is from the article's "conclusions" as it stands in the current draft version):

1)Expansion of “media” to include a number of such processes, objects and modes of perception, motility and relationality that are not usually seen as “media” in its modern, cultural sense; in this expanded mode, media becomes more an ethological relationality than merely a technological object. Hence, media ecologies can take its cue as much from flows and streams of nature or the modes of perception of animals.

2) Media ecologies engage in transversal communication that tie together the aforementioned “media of nature” to considerations of current media culture. Media ecologies can bring such dispersed practices into proximity through experimental takes, methods, field days, and such that engage for example in rethinking such human-centred notions of security and ownership that characterise contemporary media sphere. With the Eco Media project, this combined with an expansion of the notion of “free media.”

3) Media ecologies in our take act as imaginary media of sorts; but not media of imaginary things, but imagination as extension of the potentialities of media. Through the projects, we can get a glimpse on the idea of media history as a reservoir of R&D, as Garnet Hertz has labelled it in the wake of media archaeological research, which poses not only the demand to rethink temporality in a less linear sense but also the political-economic ties of media in the midst of current eco-crisis.

Needs work, but I love this opportunity to continue some of the Insect Media themes but without actually talking about insects per se. That was kind of the idea in that book, ; that insects acted as good vehicles towards thinking "relationality" and ethology of technological objects. The Eco Media project in itself is a wonderful, quirky project that also included the Eco Media open day; natural media olympics and the Pigeon vs. Internet race were among highlights! And of course, the fact that the pigeon won the race due to technical problems with the internet system...

Super-Cambridge

It's not the first time I have made the reference to J.G.Ballard while talking about Cambridge (UK). It somehow just seems to share the similar psycho-pathologies of middle-class that Ballard is continuously on about; all the innocent looking fronts, civilized habits, closed communities, and so on. Cambridge is the academic Disneyland that attracts tourists to marvel the 800 years of history of knowledge production -- the sublime Western heritage of closed institutions, privileged few and the close link of money with information.

In this context, its only natural that the tourist bus ride that I took to accompany my mother and cousins during their visit turned out to be nothing less than the poor-man's roller coaster ride through Cambridge with head-phones on tuned into a discourse of indoctrination to the marvels of not Cambridge-the-town, but Cambridge-the University. The narrative voice tells the tale of Cambridge, and its one University (hence, forgetting the Other one off the map, Anglia Ruskin that is), and basically framing the whole narrative and the mobile tour around that single theme. The mobility of the bus from the other end of Cambridge to the other is stagnated by the immobility of the discourse. Through a continuous rhetoric of "we" it weaves a success story of a very boring kind, lacking almost any kind of interesting self-reflexive touch (although recognizing e.g. the long term exclusion of women).

Naturally this kind of occupation of Cambridge could be seen through ideas of the "creative cities" á la Richard Florida, a clusterization of brains that Cambridge represents. Yet, this creative city is very much branded by a corporatisation of the area also known as Silicon Fen, not by for example an arts led agenda. And then its about the past. In academic humanities, for example, its still the very old-fashioned and hence prestigious disciplines in which the University excels with its Grand Old Men. In terms of the wider "creative industries", incidentally, even Wikipedia explains the possible reasons for the attractiveness of the Silicon Fen as: "Another explanation is that Cambridge has the academic pre-eminence of Cambridge University, a high standard of living available in the county, good transport links, and a relatively low incidence of social problems such as crime and hard drug use."

Sounds like the setting for a Ballard novel? Is this the novel he should have written next, Super-Cambridge? I have already imagined various juicy plots involving some darker rooms at King's College, weird sexual rituals, inexplicable violence, the libidinal released from the security of private schools and superior education.

Politics in 140 characters

Our funding success with AHRC (Exploring New Configurations in Network Politics-network project) could not have arrived at a better time. The events in Iran, and the buzz surrounding Twitter are something that has made people discuss about its political implications even more than with the past Moldova case. Some of the commentators have been worried that more full-fledged analysis is needed, and that of course Twitters and like cannot replace good old fashioned lengthy commentating -- all comments which are true, but also neglecting that perhaps with such 140 character inserts its not a matter of interpretation, analysis or such, but a different mode of politics altogether; a politics of doing in a different key, and interacting with different scales than in the old-fashioned idea of doing politics through a public sphere of discussions. Indeed, despite many claims of such technologies reintroducing the importance of the public sphere, we have to be aware that such a mode of public is much more multi-scalar, heterogeneous and less spatial than temporal. Its not only a matter of redefining the public and the private but of such spheres of in-betweenness that elude concepts of the modern political era from representation to public, from citizen/private to action.

What the project we got up and running with Joss Hands is doing is exactly trying to map such blind spots, interzones, transversal connections, multiple scales and new modes of action/discourse that characterize the network culture. Joss is himself finishing a very much needed book on digital activism, and my interests in this field lie in the idea of "politics of imperceptibility"; how beyond a politics of representation, recognizability and visual culture that characterised a post-1960s media cultural approach and cultural theory, we need accounts of politics of becoming invisible, imperceptibility both as the ontology and tactics of network culture. This idea stemming from Deleuze and Guattari has been elaborated in a sense by Elizabeth Grosz in her writings on sensation and nature and for example Galloway and Thacker in their more recent The Exploit-book, speculating on politics of such "future avant-garde"; beyond being registered, informationalized, gridded, there is a need for tactics of avoidance, going off the radar. In this sense, we can also export the idea to a politics of cartography of that which goes of the map, or is not mapped through/in the algorithmic logic of network culture. In other words, the "new configurations" or imperceptible or non-existent of network culture that our networking project explores is not understood in the negative sense of shedding light on such obscurities, but in embracing it as a concrete potentiality of politics. (As a footnote, all this pointing towards e.g. non-representationality is not that new but could be linked to the various conceptualizations that have been emerging from Agamben's coming communities to Deleuze's "people to come" etc.).

Naturally, its not all about rhizomes and distributed networks with such politics -- far from it. As Joss will show in his forthcoming book, for example the much discussed Obama-campaign demonstrated how the power law is at the core of such politics --- not only a politics of the micro, but a politics of the power law. In addition, its still through the old media that such new modes of participation gain their currency and disseminate. Its much more complex also in terms of inter-medial ties. But the actual work starts now...more during the coming 2 years...This is the first larger funded project for ArcDigital and I am sure not the last one.

Art and Electronic Media

I wrote a review of Edward Shanken's huge Art and Electronic Media just recently for the Finnish journal of audiovisual culture, Lähikuva. Well, the review is not out yet, and even when it will be, it's of course in Finnish, so just a short summary. Any book that due to its size could be a proper murder weapon merits a word or two.

Shanken's book is part of Phaidon's Themes and Movement-series, so it is less a study than an archive. Even though it fits into the wider field of "media art histories", its less a history in the sense of offering a unified narrative than an archive. Perhaps this is actually not only a function of the book series, but the topic itself; the whole theme of "electronic media and art" is way too heterogeneous and open than something that could be tied to a narrative format, and hence is by its nature something that calls for an "archival" approach. And for Shanken, its not only a book on the art pieces or objects but also points towards the various practices and histories of engagement with technical media -- and hence, interestingly, points towards histories of modernity, and the proximities of art-science-technology that brand the media archaeology of digital culture.

Shanken offers a good introduction to the topic in a fashion that opens up to non-experts. He reflects on categorisations offered as well as on some of the principles of what qualifies as electronic art. Indeed, his key point is to extend towards the media technological conditionings of such pieces introduced in the book, but to the continuity of genres and themes across media. I had my doubts about the approach, as I believe one of the crucial functions of media arts is exactly to carve out and probe for the singularities of the media in which they function. This is where the media archaeological approach becomes relevant as well; not only offering historical narratives, but being able to point towards the inscription surfaces on which media is carved. (Well, that did not sound too original after Foucault.)

Yet, Shanken's approach is quite often good. The section on "Motion, Duration, Illum

ination" is an intuitive one that moves through Frank Malina's Systeme Lumidyne

(1956) to for example Paul DeMarinis' media archaeological Edison Effect (1989.) (Pictured).

In addition to visual culture, the sonic is strongly present also in such sections as Charged Environment (e.g. John Cage and Toshio Iwai) and in Networks, Surveillance, Culture Jamming (with Paul D. Miller's Errata Erratum 2002). On the other hand, a section entitled Simulations and Simulacra is a bit too predictable.

Talking nowadays about media arts, you are bound to encounter the theme of embodiment. This is present for example in the section Bodies, Surrogates, Emergent Systems. This and other sections show how much electronic media art has contributed in conceptualising new materialities and embodiments. Of course, in the midst of cyberculture enthusiasm various A-life and other simulation systems got a lot of attention, but Shanken is able to point towards other kinds of catalysations which produce the familiar bodies into anomalous, new, surprising. Here, the human body itself can become a medium. David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (1986-2000) turns the human body in its movement into sounds. Antúnez Roca's Epizoo (1994) opens up the human body susceptible to external control, even pain, in a similar fashion as Stelarc's Ping Body from 1994. Breath (1994, pictured below) by Ulrike Gabriel is a mesmerizing piece that tunes breathing through a computer algorithm into a polygone representation. Breathing becomes visual, topological, inhabits space in a new way that's not to my liking so much representation but environmental and hence rewires back into the neural system of the breather -- this piece is much more interesting than any simple cybernetic idea, and points towards the crucial field of what is beyond control and non-cognitive in embodiment. (A theme that Nigel Thrift has written interesting things about.)

Electronic media art is able to articulate and summon forces invisible. Breath is a good example, but as much works articulating e.g. forces of capitalism are present in the work. My favorites here include Gary Hill's Soundings that articulates the different materiality of perception of sound and Nancy Paterson's Stock Market Skirt (1998) that does not neglect the gendered dimensions of the forces of capitalism.

A very good addition to the book is the extensive compilation of key texts of the field. This includes various texts by pioneers from Nam June Paik to Roy Ascott. Whereas the field of "mediaarthistories" has been actively organizing the past years, such works are excellent in opening up it to the wider academic and art field. Shanken does a good job; more in my Finnish review! In a more tone more directly aimed at the academic audience, I am now occupying myself with Sven Spieker's The Big Archive that focuses not only on the appropriation of the "greyness of the archive" in European modernist avant-garde, but actually also in the whole "archivality" of modernity. A good read, so far.