with high tech media, and all of that returns to the environment; back to bodies organic of workers dismantling such technologies to extract material for resale and reuse, and back to nature as waste and material remains.
which and to which they go (and never left). Of course, the previous never really were immaterial, despite the already mentioned narrative misunderstandings of 1980s and 1990s.
This need, ever more crucial also for the arts and artistic, creative, experimental practices, is to think of this continuum and the ways in which our electronic and high-tech media culture is entwined with a variety of material agencies. Acknowledging the intensive discussions of recent years concerning non-humans, object-agencies and other notions that speculate with the real and claim that there is a new materialism in town, I turn to what seems a quite literal, almost traditional materiality. The notion of ‘materiality’ is taken here in to refer, for instance, to ‘plasma reactions and ion implantation’ (Yoshida, 1994: 105) – as in processes of semiconductor fabrication, or to an alternative list of media studies and media art objects and components which are studied from an e-waste management perspective. What if instead of genre, apparatus or experience, and other familiar notions concerning media and artistic work, process or subjectivity, we need to think of these kinds of lists: ‘metal, motor/compressor, cooling, plastic, insulation, glass, LCD, rubber, wiring/ electrical, concrete, transformer, magnetron, textile, circuit board, fluorescent lamp, incandescent lamp, heating element, thermostat, brominated flamed retardant (BFR)containing plastic, batteries, CFC/HCFC/HFC/ HC, external electric cables, refractory ceramic fibers, radioactive substances and electrolyte capacitors (over L/D 25 mm)’, and which themselves are constituted from a range of materials – plastics, wood, plywood, copper, aluminum, silver, gold, palladium, lead, merBut how to think the media-ecological in this cury, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, hexavalent way? How to bring this ecosophical idea into chromium and flame retardants (Pinto, 2008). concrete reality concerning waste and the dirty matter already flagged above? For one, In short, media are of nature, and return to nawe need to establish continuities between ture – where the production process for our the supposedly immaterial, and the material media devices, from screens to circuits, net– between information technologies and our works to interfaces, involves the standardizahigh tech media, and the material world from tion and mass-mobilization of minerals and This talk investigates the ecology of contemporary media culture through notions of waste, and artistic investigations into the materiality of media – not only technological specificity but such themes that discuss matter, components and energy. Such a media ecological perspective argues, following Félix Guattari, that we always need to talk of ecologies always in plural. It includes things that are material as well as incorporeal, things as well as ideas, or lets say, to avoid being too idealist: the potential of thinking-doing otherwise. This is what Guattari was after too: ecology developed into eco-sophy, where the potentials of the ecological movement extend to other regimes too, not least that of the mind – an ecology of the virtual, that for him was about the potential space, something that does not reside only in what already is, the actual, but reaches for the virtual, or in Guattari’s (1995: 91) beautiful words: “beyond the relations of actualized forces, virtual ecology will not simply attempt to preserve the endangered species of cultural life but equally to engender conditions for the creation and development of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and felt.” This point about never been seen and felt is where the idea of the virtual touches on the possibility of new ways of seeing, and feeling and hence, is however connected to the virtuality of something material; matter far from stability and characterized by its dynamics and potential.