"Incommunicable Matter: Writhing Bios and Excess in Traditional Media Ecology" (original) (raw)

When Neil Postman coined the phrase “media ecology” in 1968 he saw it articulating the lived environment as a complex of circulating messages. This representational discourse has been helpful in understanding how humans interacted with the technical media of their time - but the very inclusion of “ecology” in the term hints at biological lifeforces potentially more inscrutable to though no less present in our habitable surround. Early video artists were particularly sensitive to the murky interpenetrations of techno- and bio-ecologies, creating closed circuit television installations teeming with organic entities, for example, Frank Gillette’s Process and Meta-Process of 1973. Slime-molds, tortoises, and tarantulas shared the space with humans and video, but it’s questionable just how many messages were successfully circulating. This presentation aims to show what can be gained (and lost) by folding in the incommunicable to ecology, that writhing activity in excess of human sensoria.