Ambient Media Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Increasingly, 'ambient practices' traditionally associated with the sonic arts are said to expand across fields such as literature, architecture, computing, management, interior decorating, meteorology, urbanism, design, marketing, perfumery, and visual art. In this thesis, I suggest that the double question raised by the most important ambient practices is this: what would happen if one were to (1) recognize the contemporary moment as one in which discontinuity, specificity, and singularity—whether of media, of historical or cultural objects, or even of political organizations and economies—are increasingly being dissolved into a seamless, global environment or “mix,” and (2) willfully reproduce the textures and patterns of such a mix as a form of cultural practice, without becoming mired in an asocial and impotent quietism? How can the distracted attunement to impersonal flows of affect and data that characterizes our subjection be best appropriated and reinvented (rather than merely “resisted”)? This has everything to do with ubiquitous computing, with the total interpenetration of computational networks and everyday life, and also with the possibility of socio-artistic interventions into these conditions, especially in an age in which many of the dreams of the historical avant-gardes have materialized as software. In order to address these questions, I primarily examine the "ambient poetics" of the American poet Tan Lin alongside the writing of Lisa Robertson, the music of Brian Eno and Erik Satie, the technology design concept of "ubiquitous computing," Mark Hansen's "atmospheric media," Gilles Deleuze's "societies of control," and Matteo Pasquinelli's "metadata society."