The World as Clock- The Network Society and Experimental Ecologies

8/7/2019 The World as Clock- The Network Society and Experimental Ecologies

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Andrew Murphie

The World as Clock:

The Network Society andExperimental Ecologies

ABSTRACT

The concept, politics, and society of the network are examined in the light of conceptstaken from media ecologies, Guattaris notion of the three ecologies of socius,1 self, and

environment, Simondons discussion of transduction, and Guattaris political deployment oftransversality. The reality of the virtual is taken as the basis for a politics of networked media,and a case is made for a transdisciplinary response. Recent ecological/electronic/digital artworks and media processes are discussed as demonstrating interesting emergent aspects ofthe ecological aspect of the network society. These include Lars von Triers 1996production ofVerdensuret (The Worlds Clock, in which live images of an ants nest in theUnited States determined the performance of 50 actors in a Copenhagen art gallery), thedigital video work of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, and the nightly news. The paperconcludes, following Guattaris ethico-aesthetic paradigm, that in a post-media world,experimental media ecologies are crucial to the affective, ethical, and ideo-diversity of thenetwork society.

All existing theoretical bodies of this type share the shortcoming of being closed to thepossibility of creative proliferation. Flix Guattari (2000:55)

Guattari wrote the above in 1989 when the network society was about to enter adecade of triumphant creative proliferation. Network technologies, network logics,the very concept of the network seemed to take over the planet. The network gavepassage to new modes of warfare, new modes of Capital, new modes of being, newaesthetics. At the same time the network challenged not only existing theoreticalbodies but bodies of all kindsthe human body, social bodies, institutional, political

and disciplinary bodies. Many important contemporary questions are about remain-ing open to the creative proliferations of the network after its triumph, even if this isfrom a desire to approach the network critically. What type of theoretical bodieswill adapt? One useful way to think the network throughand to explore the newpragmatics of the networkis through a reworking of the concept of ecology.


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The networkboth as an inescapable social event and as conceptcalls for a substan-tial reworking of the concept of ecology. Ecology is pluralized. It becomes not only amatter of the environment but of media ecologies, cognitive ecologies, ecologies ofperception and affect. Moreover, these ecologies need to be considered singly, in their

interaction with other ecologies, and both at the same time. The pluralization of inter-active ecologies necessarily has a political dimension, first recognized in Gregory Batesonsgeneral ecology of mind which included three cybernetic or homeostatic systems: theindividual human organism, the human society, and the larger ecosystem (1972:446).In Flix Guattaris work this becomes the three ecologies of the environment, thesocial, and human subjectivity. In this, Guattaris politics is not focussed on changes insystems of references, the way the world is framed, or the way in which the logic ofdiscursive sets endeavours to completely delimit its objects (2000:44). Rather, he isconcerned with the logic of intensities, or eco-logic, [which] is concerned only withthe movement and intensity of evolutive processes. For him, this is indeed politics of

process, apposite to the network, in which the task is to capture existence in the veryact of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization (ibid).

In this article I shall first give a brief account of some useful concepts for the study ofthe network society in the light of an eco-logic of intensities. These are concepts suchas transversality and transduction, which take us at least part of the way towardscapturing existence in the very act of its constitution. In doing so, I am particularlyconcerned to separate the conceptsof the network from the contemporary technologiesof the network. I shall then discuss some useful pragmatic examples of experimentalecologies involving ants, satellite communications, actors, artists, newsreaders, and

lobsters

(cf. Rossiter 2003). As Guattari writes, we need new social and aestheticpractices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, the foreign, the strange(2000:68; emphasis added). Dealing with the strange may also be a matter of survivalfor institutions when responding to increasingly networked ecologies.

Thinking Ecologically, Thinking Transversally

All the ecologies mentioned above seem less and less self-contained. They are also lessamenable to old, or even newer, disciplinarities. As they diversify, ecologies seemriddled with transversals (Genosko 2003; Guattari 2000), connections that cannot be

reduced to any one ecology or discipline and transform all those they pass through. Inthe process, these new ecologies and their transversals are initiating new and multiply-ing existing connections between science-society-ethics-aesthetics-politics (Genosko2003:138). As Guattari puts it, we must learn to think differently.

Nature cannot be separated from culture . we must learn to think transver-sally. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so ourtelevision screens are populated, saturated, by degenerate images and state-ments.... In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted toproliferate freely.... (2000:43)

Thinking transversally is a challenge to disciplinarity in favour of a transdisciplinaryapproach to these interactions (in which transversals not only connect, but qualitativelychange the points connected). This does not, however, involve abandoning the study ofsocial and political relations. As Guattari makes clear, the case is quite the opposite.


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The challenge to think transversally is a response to political, social, and indeed eco-logical emergencies, occasioned in part by the network. Indeed, either for those whowish to profit from them, or those who wish to understand and perhaps reinventcontemporary social relations, these emergencies make two things clear. Firstly, the

individuations of political and social relations, structures, and institutions, are alwaysongoing assemblages of previous individuations. They are never settled, and are notreally, certainly not only, structures in any static sense. Secondly, the processes involvedare by and large transversal.

However, the transversal nature of individuations is often not obvious because culturestill makes a fetish of transcendent identities that seem to rise above relations, in asense deny the ecologies of the network. The search for these fetish identities onlyintensifies as the power of the network increases (Castells 2000). In institutions suchas universities, disciplines, even surprisingly media disciplines, often echo this cultureof the identity fetish. They often seem possessed by a panicked desire to restrict apotentially transdisciplinary materialism. The transdisciplinary withers away to at bestthe inter-disciplinary, and more often a simple shoot-out between different accounts ofthe perception of matter. Yet social and political analysis demands that we now em-brace this dynamic materialism before networked ecologies leave many current insti-tutions and disciplines behind. One of the first great network thinkers, Alfred White-head, put it this way long ago:

The whole concept of absolute individuals with absolute rights, and with acontractual power of forming fully defined external relations, has broken down.The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of itsexistence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent to it, andconversely it is immanent in the environment which it helps to transmit.(1956:80)

This suggests an urgent need for re-situating political and social analyses/actions withintheir immanent ecological performances and questioning the many points at whichdisciplinarity thwarts an engagement with a networked world.

Transductions, Life, and Technics

Any individual is to some extent a network, and any network involves an ecology oftransversals. Of course, viewed from this ecological angle, the network is not new, buthas always existed. What is new is a network society based upon what we might callthe conceptual and practical recognition of the networked nature of existence, alongwith new technics associated with this recognition. Having recognized the network,the next question concerns its distinctive processes. In this ecological context, theprocesses that make networks work can be thought of as transductions. Understandingtransductions shall lead us towards understanding the power of the virtual within thenetwork.

As transversality performs its immanent work connecting ecologies, pre-individualcomponents and processes (living and non-living) are brought together in new proc-esses of open systemic individuation. This ongoing individuation is precisely whatGilbert Simondon calls transduction (Simondon 1992; Mackenzie 2002). Simply


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put, although it is not this simple, transduction is an operation that allows for a trans-lation of intensities between different domains. This translation of intensities is neededif different domains are to interact. Simple examples of transductions in the form oftechnical elements, as given by Adrian Mackenzie, would include a blade, a spring, a

switch, or a cultivated seed (2002:16). Just as Guattaris transversality calls for athought and politics of the transversal, the concept of transduction calls for a thoughtand politics that aligns itself with the diversity of transductions.

A more complex notion of transduction implies two related ideas. Both arise becausefor Simondon any individual is really a transindividual (1992:310), a collective reso-nance of other (pre)individuals. Firstly then, transduction describes the fact that Theliving individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system and also a sys-tem that individuates itself (Simondon 1992:305). Secondly, transduction is a techni-cal term (in the broadest sensewe are not thinking only of technologies but of allkinds of processes, the techniques that make up human culture for example). Astransduction is the technics2 for the translation of intensitiesso that they can resonatewith each other, it is the technical prerequisite for any system of individuation. It isimportant to note that transduction is not initially a matter of shifting representationsor communications between pre-given entities (senders and receivers for example). Itis not only, although at times it might be, a translation of messages or codes. Rathertransduction translates intensities so that they can be brought into individuating sys-tems. Within systems, transductions take these systems beyond themselves in ongoingindividuation.

Although appropriate to living systems, the ecological nature of the term, in which the

individual is a matter of relations rather then entities, takes us beyond the normalconception of the living organism. Thus, for Simondon,

it would be possible to consider every relation as having the status of a being, and asundergoing development within a new individuation. A relation does not springup between two terms that are already separate individuals, rather, it is an aspectof the internal resonance of a system of individuation. (306)

For Mackenzie, transduction describes a dynamic technicity, the diverse interactionsand resonances between the elementary technicities present in a technical ensemble

(2002:15). Simondon himself notes that the term transductiondenotes a processbeit physical, biological or socialin which an activity gradually sets itself in motion,propagating within a given area, through a structuration of the different zones of thearea over which it operates (1992:313). Significantly, in terms of my discussion ofecologies, networks and (trans)disciplines, the resulting ensemble involves resonanceand coupling between diverse realities (Mackenzie 2002:16). This places both livingand non-living in a context of diverse relations, and this in turn helps us to understandthe relations between the environment, technology and life. Importantly, seen from thepoint of view of transductions, environment, technology, and life are not fused withina system. A network is never fusion. Yet neither are environment, technology, and life,

strictly speaking, separable. In fact, they individuate with each other, at the same timeas the tensions between different individuating systems such as life, technology,and the environment give rise to multitudes of new differencesthe more so themore networked they are.


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This complicates our understanding of life, technology, and the environment from anetwork perspective. For example, for Simondon, the living being is both more andless than a unity, possesses an internal problematic and is capable of being an elementin a problematic that has a wider scope than itself (1992:306).

Understanding an individual as more and less than a unity leads us to understand thepower of the virtual. We also understand why the conceptual recognition of the net-worked nature of existence leads to technologies that tend towards the virtual. This isnot to suggest that the virtual is itself a technical innovation, or equivalent to thetechnologies that develop from its recognition. The virtual is certainly not reducible totechnologies such as VR (Murphie 2002). Rather, although the technologies of thenetwork may trade on the power of the virtual, the virtual is best understood ecologi-cally. I shall follow through on this idea of the virtual briefly before I turn to Lars vonTriers network ecology of ants, satellites, and actors.

For Simondon, the ecological nature of individuation is not only real but primary. Anindividual isthe ongoing process of its relations. Moreover, there are relations withinrelations and individuations within individuations. Thus any individual contains aninternal problematic in which preindividual processes are brought into resonance. Atthe same time, any individual is simultaneously immanent to the [broader] environ-ment which it helps to transmit (Whitehead 1956:80). The crucial implication is thatany individuation implies an excess of ecological intensities. Firstly, there is more inthe individual than can be expressed at any given moment, or even brought intoresonance through transduction. As Simondon writes, an individual carries with it acertain inheritance associated with its preindividual reality, one animated by all the

potentials that characterize it (1992:306). It is from this excess of potentials thatfuture individuals will evolve. Secondly, there is more from outside the individual,connected to the process of individuation, than can be expressed at any given moment.In an ecological setting, participation means being an element in a much largerprocess of individuation by means of the inheritance ofpreindividual reality that theindividual containsthat is, due to the potentials it contains (306). Put simply, theenvironment always contains more intensity than that part of it that becomes a mo-ment in the process of individuation. We feel this, for example, in media overload,although such excess is a part of all perception. Put very simply, in any given momentof individuation there is an excess over the actual expressions of this individuation.This excessthe real network from which real potentials ariseis the virtual.

The virtual therefore possesses its own reality (Massumi 2002; DeLanda 2002)thenetwork of preindividual reality. The technologies of the network society recognizethis reality, in that they attempt to expand the range of expression of forms of net-worked individuation. This is the creative proliferation I referred to at the beginningof this article. Yet, again, the virtual, as the complex structure immanent to any inter-action, is the vast well from which contemporary technologies are drawing, not thetechnologies themselves. The technologies involved thus lead us to think beyond them,with Guattari, to a virtual ecology (Genosko in Guattari 2002:115).

Accepting the reality of the virtual obviously poses a series of challenges to disciplinaryinstitutions. The notions of transversality, transduction, and the reality of the virtualalso imply a general breakdown of what seemed the clear and culturally foundationaldivide between technics and life, or technics and thought (Stiegler 1998). Yet it is


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important to think this breakdown in terms other than the simple fusion of nature andculture, life and technology, technics and thought, while acknowledging the diversity ofthe forms of expression that do indeed lie between them. Nothing less is involved thanthe urgency of rethinking the social in relation to its ecologies. As Guattari puts it,

one cannot separate a transformation of the environment one cannot come togrips with the essential parameters of the biosphere, if one has not also changedmentalities, if one has not reconstructed social tissue, if one has not reinvented it(2001:41). It is quite likely that such conscious reinventionconceptual and politi-calwill be playing catch up with the new techno-social ecologies of the networksociety.

Yet we are not starting from zero. There is an increasing recognition of the transversalityof ecologies both in cultural practices and in the development of new concepts thatassist these practices. The aim in what follows is to document some small contribu-tions to the ongoing transdisciplinary experimentationthe reinvention of mentalitiesand social tissuethat networked ecologies seem to require. In the process I shall bearguing for the importance of media ecologies. I shall also argue for more considera-tion of their relation to other ecologies, such as cognitive ecologies, or Flix Guattaristhree ecologies. Examining networked structures and ecological emergences as theyoccur in Verdensuret(The Worlds Clock)(1996), a Danish art/performance installationby Lars von Trier, the banality of the nightly news, and queues of migrating lobsters,might possibly tell us something about networked media ecologies in relation to theirbroader ecological contexts. It might also tell us something about the ambivalent poli-tics of attempting to impose new world orders on the network.

The World as Clock

My biggest problem in life is control over chaos. I can become crazy for fear ofnot having control when I really want to have it. The happiest situation I canimagine is to accept this lack of controlbut this is nearly a masochistic thoughtfor me. All the situations in which I begin to get anxious are where I lose control.(Lars von Trier in Kunstforeningen 1996 my translation)

Danish film director and at times prolific valium taker, Lars von Trier, draws his art

out of the very ambiguity of the term control freak. This is not only in his films.

In 1996 von Trier arranged for video coverage of an ants nest in New Mexico. Imagesof the movements of the ants were sent live via satellite to a computer in a three-storeygallery in the heart of Copenhagen. This gallery was filled with 53 actors and 19different sets waiting for instructions. In a corner of each of the 19 sets was a row offour coloured lights that sometimes flashedflashed, that is, according to whether theants had crossed certain grids marked out on the computer screen a certain number oftimes. The 53 actors improvised in part within a structure of moodsthat were deter-mined by the flashing of the lights, and in part on the basis of given characters (both

mood changes and characters, different for each performer, were given to them by vonTrier and the writer Niels Vrsel). There was no given plot or story (although therewas, of course, narrative emergence).


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The performance continued for two months. So the actors were trapped, improvisingall day for this period. Their characters were given names such as: Petite 1 and 2,Postman, Body, Guru, Boy Wonder, Moody, AA. Some were designated as generallylove struck, some as psychopathic, and so on. They were also given a bunch of moods

of their very own, which only they knew. A few characters also had specific behav-iours added. If a character called Starseed touched you, for example, you had tofreeze on the spot (Romney 2000). A character called The Cur, hating everyone, hadorders to start fights whenever the lights went red. What none of the other actorsknewand never found out because he was so aggressivewas that he also had to losefights when challenged (Wistreich 2000).

The work was titled Psykomobile # 1: Verdensuret(Psychomobile #1: The Worlds Clock).It was a great example of what I call (without wishing to found a movement) differentialmedia (Murphie 2003). These are media that enhance and fracture differences, includ-ing, but not only, within the very concept of media itself. They involve media events,usually networked media events, that make the very term media slip so much it startsto lose its track.3 The differential that gave birth to Verdensuret was between image-based art, performance and film (indeed, a film now documents Verdensure: De Udstillede(The Exhibited) by Jesper Jargil (Denmark 2000).

It was, as the catalogue puts it, a journey to an unknown land a place betweencontrol and kaos (Kunstforeningen 1996). Emergence and structure were circlingaround each other, at times at giddying speeds. The crucial point is that it was bothcontrol andchaosstructure and emergenceat the same time. In fact, as with allvon Triers work, the question posed was one of exactly where the line between these

two can be drawn, or whether they are so entwined that we can neither separate themnor suggest an ethics (as most are) based on the exclusion of one or the other. Thisechoes the realization in many disciplines that emergence and structure are not anto-nyms (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Massumi 2002; DeLanda 2002). They ratherform, in the terms of Jos Gil, a persistent antinomy, a pair of contradictory if bothpartially effective explanations. Gil points out that antinomies only exist because ofreductions of the whole of power to a single object or perspective power cannot beseen to be enclosed in a sole object because of history (1998:5). The antinomy ofemergence and structures is one that our understanding of networked ecologies ur-gently needs to work through.

Such antinomies are reflected in some reviews ofThe Worlds Clock. One reviewer,repeating a common reductive assumption about the networked society, suggestedthat it was a matter of Wondering what it would be like if peoples behaviour weredetermined by a system they couldnt control (Romney 2000). Yet this control sce-nario is perhaps not the best conception of either The Worlds Clockor the politics ofnetworks.

Firstly, here the controlled behaviour did not refer to action so much as mood. Mood,not action, was primary, and mood does not cause things to happen in the same way

as direct action. In fact, if we (only somewhat cavalierly) substitute Alfred Whitehe-ads term affective tone for mood, the paradoxes involved in controlling moodbecome clear.


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[C]onscious discrimination is a variable factor only present in the moreelaborate examples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is emo-tional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originat-ing from things whose relevanceis given. (Whitehead 1956:226; emphasis

added)If affective tone is an immanent ecology of relevance4 before it is cooked down tosubsequent identifiable events and things, then it cannot simply be pre-directed. Inaddition, the sense perceptions via which affective tone works cannot be totally givenexcept in processin complex ecologies of emergence. It is only within this process(and later rather than earlier) that a pattern of affective tone is conformally producedby a pattern of sensa as datum (Whitehead 1956:315). This suggests that directionsgiven to mood are a strange thing indeed. They are not controls; directing the emer-gent affective tone of the complex sense perceptions of events is impossible in any

case. Directions relating to mood are, rather, ecological nudges. They are like tryingto influence the weather, perhaps in the seeding of clouds, or perhaps in the perform-ance of rituals to do with bringing rain (in The Worlds Clockone was asking for theequivalent of rain and sunshine, drought and floods, all at the same time, distributedamong the ecologies of actors). Furthermore, the ecological nudges provided are inpart pre-determined by the scripted directions to actors, but also fully acknowledge theecology of ants and satellites (an environmental and techno-social ecology). In short,there is a structure of feedback and emergence rather than control.

Furthermore, mood is not a secondary event. I would suggest that we could see moodas a kind of human weather, with similar sets of consequences. Mood, like the weather,suggests complex interactions, not simple control. Put simply, the ants did not causewhat happened in the gallery. Neither, lest we overdetermine the technical instants ofthe network, did the satellites that allow networked communication cause the events.Rather an ecology in which ants and satellites were participating gave rise to whathappened. We could say that The Worlds Clockmakes Guattaris three ecologies clearin their relation. Ecologies of the self (actors), of the socius (the gallery, the audience,the technologies) and of the environment (the ants) were deeply enmeshed.

Furthermore, in such an intense situation, mood seemed to carry things beyond theedges of the installation ecology. Moods and ecologies rarely have neat borders in fact,

as the concept of affective tone makes clear, mood registers the patterns across theborders of the networks involved. Thus, actors continued their roles offstage and thefamous but always thin line between life and performance was often eroded. Actorswho were supposed to be in love on-set began off-set relationships which fed back intothe work. Others fought with each other off-set about how they could possible justifywhat they had done on-set. One actor remarked that There are light changes whichchange lives (Romney 2000).

The whole system was also subject to violent disruption from outside. On one occa-sion someone in New Mexico threw a potato chip into the ants nest. There was

mayhem in Copenhagen while the ants rushed around, feeding on the chip. Anothertime all the ants but two died and there was very little going on in Copenhagen.

How did it all end?


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Well in melodrama and soap opera of courseand both are well-known territory forvon Trier. Yet there were twists. For example, one actor, when their character waskilled by another, returned covered in talc to torment the murderer.

Like all good eco-systems, The Worlds Clockwas also genetic. Other media artworks

and movements came out of it. It arguably gave crucial ecological nudges both to thewell known Dogme projects (the manifesto had been written but none of the Dogmefilms made) and to a lesser known project by many of those involved in Dogme, D-dag(http://www.d-dag.dk/), and perhaps even to the reality television show, Big Brother.D-dag(D-Day) was a fairly major experiment in interactive television on New YearsEve, 1999-2000. Four directors, including von Trier, sent out film crews on New YearsEve to film different characters involvement in a real-time story. This was broadcastover several television channels and viewers at home could watch different versions ofthe story merely by switching channels with their remotes. It was tremendously suc-cessful; 1.4 million viewers participated (about a quarter of the population of Denmark).

Acid/Clock

Yet if emergence rightly suggests creation, we are only half way there. By coincidence(and admittedly by virtue of my own whimsy), in Danish, Verdensuret (the worldsclock) sounds a lot like verdens syre(the worlds acid). Moreover, the ants provided theclock for this piece; ants are as famous for their acid, their erosions, and corrosions,as their nests. So the antsas analog world clockdemonstrate that digital grids areonly ever a partial capture of analog relations (even 1s and 0s are ecologies of analog

variations in voltage). Digital structures construct secondary patterns in response tothe analogue worlds mood or affective tone.

The underlying ambivalence of worlds clock/worlds acid seems to capture somethinglike the undecidability between structure/emergence and corrosion. Our ecologiesmedia, cognitive or otherwiseare not just nice neat collections of things that happento be next to each other and constantly create. They converge and differentiate. Theyare generative. They do form structures, yet they are simultaneously corroding eachother. Nothing within these ecologies will be standing still.

A networked world is more intensely subject to both (analogue and digital) clocks and(analog) acids at the same time. It is more of an ordering world andmore of a chaoticworld. As such, it is also a world in which time itself is eroded and created at everymoment. These shifting times add to the sense that the ultimate undecidability be-comes one of world itself. World, media, and for that matter culture, remainindeterminate. Perhaps more importantly, the relations between them remain indeter-minate, and need to be approached as such, not only in analysis, but also in thecreative construction of transdisciplinary relations.

Such notions are not so far from McLuhans, or from the foundation of media ecologies.Yet to media ecologies as often currently conceived, we perhaps need the addition ofsomething like Isabelle Stengers ecology of practices. In an ecology of practices,political hope might lie in trying to feel what lurks in the interstices (Stengers 2002:245)in a world full of interstices where what may become possible is lurking (247). AsStengers puts it, an ecology of practices is about how different forms of knowledgeand cultural practices work, but it is also the relation between what is happening and


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the way it defines itself in relation with others (262). This implies a creative ecologicalapproach producing new articulations the creation of such relations are events(264-65).

New media arts are important because they demonstrate the need for media experi-

mentation precisely with regard to ecological events. In the process, new media artspresent us with what we might call a more complex materialism. This is a materialismconceived in a more complex manner both ethically and philosophically: one thatmight, for example, incorporate virtual ecologies as much as actual ecologies. Thismaterialism might also incorporate interstitial ecologies, or lead us to the complexityof relational ecologies so badly understood in the general politics of the network. Putsimply, this materialism might begin with a politics of affect, as developed by Massumiin his description of the autonomy of affect, where the primacy of the affective ismarked by a gap between content and effect (2000:24). Such a materialism comple-ments, not necessarily replaces, the political analysis of representations and framings,although I would argue that the latter are secondary to the former. As Massumi puts it,passage precedes position (67).

Ian Angus (1998) approaches these issues a little differently, combining the work ofInnis, Husserl, and Foucault. As Angus describes it, for Innis the focus is on themateriality of communication media rather than the manifest content of language(Angus 1998:np), and a medium is to do with the expressive capacity of the livingbody rather than the dead materiality of straightforwardly physical characteristics.Thus a medium is an individuation of an ecology of what Angus calls correlativemultiplicities of kinesthetic processes. The bias of a medium is not about its con-

tent initially, but emphasizes a certain perceptual and cognitive direction of a commu-nication and makes another direction difficult, or even impossible, to express in thatmedium. For Angus, this means that the issue is not how media represent social lifeso much as how they construct it. Even more dynamically, we could say the issueconcerns the individuations, transversals and transductions that are brought into play,not just in social life but in the broader ecological contexts of this life.

Let us take the rather general example of the increasingly networked nature of newscorporations. This not only provides an increasingly monolithic global transportationof sameness, of certain messages or representations through fixed circuits (although

this is important to the aims of corporations it is also ecologically impossible). Net-worked news might also be seen as a matter of an ongoing corporate individuation andflexibility, of the mobilization of differential intensities so important to politics (so thatthe content of the messages given out by politicians or news networks is secondary totheir ability to mobilize intensitiesthe things that we love to hate as much as we loveto love). Networked news might be seen as a matter of the incorporation of thesedifferential intensities into resonances, even between antithetical opinions, as long asthese stay with the affective programme. Networked news might also be seen as pro-ductive of individuations that thrive on these intensities through certain forms ofaccess to real virtuality. As such, networked news produces certain modes of participa-tion in the creation of the world, and in the forces that exceed any momentary actuali-zation of the world. This is not, to take an Australian example, initially a matter offraming an issue such as asylum seekers. It is initially a matter of individuating theseeking of asylum as an issue, within ecological contexts. It would subsequently be amatter of mobilizing the intensities that move through this issue.


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Such analyses might begin to account for why so few people seem to believe in anynaive sense what they hear either on the news or from politicians, at the same time asthe news and political statements still carry so much intensity and impact so materiallyon political-economic realities. The relation of the network and news might also, of

course, allow for the disruption of corporate individuations by dissonant intensities(Internet news ecologies versus the televisual, for example).

Another example of the politics of networks that can be approached ecologically is thecreative proliferation of screens. Screens are currently forming many new ecologies;through the smaller screens on devices such as iPods, PDAs, digital cameras, mobilephones, passenger seats, or the many windows of any given computer desktop; throughthe larger screens of home theatres, video billboards, and video conferencing. Thesecomplex screen ecologies interact with us in more and more aspects of our everydaylife. They could again be seen as an attempt to involve us the more in a monolithic,fixed circuit of representations, or framings, in which we are increasingly absorbedinto a society of spectacle (Debord), or simulacra (Baudrillard). Alternatively, thisengagement with complex screen ecologies could be seen as allowing for new forms ofdifferentiation and individuation, in which the screens are not, or not only or at alltimes, controlling devices, but rather intensities in relation to other intensitiesper-haps to what Massumi calls the imagistic potential of the postmodern body (2002:44).This is a potential, in the new setting of networked media, in which images form theirown new resonating differentials and individuations with other aspects of affect, per-ception, sensation and (inter)action.

Again, there is a social and political urgency to all such questions. For example, in

discussing the surprising political effectiveness of Ronald Reagan, Massumi writes that

the far right is far more attuned to the imagistic potential of the postmodernbody than the established left and has exploited that advantage for at least thelast two decades. Philosophies of affect, potential, and actualization may aid infinding countertactics. (44)

In sum, the kinds of questions that we need to address to the ecologies involvingnetworked media and contemporary political events are not initially about what theseevents represent, or how they represent, or even what they allow to be represented.

They are about changes in what Angus calls the materiality of expression (1998).Considering such questions leads us to approach some basic assumptions about mediaand culture very differently. For example, one obvious political aspect of ecologicalevents and their affective tone is that these provide the basis for thought, here con-sidered not only as symbolic processing but as individuating perception/action withinshifting events. Although a great many questions buried in the relation between mediaand cognitive ecologies will go begging here, in the next section I want to ask somequestions about thought in relation to the ecologies discussed so far.

Thought, Ecologies, and Disciplinarity

Can we still conceive of thought as occurring in any one place such as the head/brainin the context of works such as The Worlds Clock? There are thinkers in various disci-plines who would suggest that the answer to this question is no. For example, phi-


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losopher of cognition Andy Clark (1997) has written of extended mind in whichthought is distributed through brain, body, and world. Roboticist Rodney Brooks hassuggested that the world is its own best model (1991b:139) for action, rather thaninternal representations or symbolic reason. Deleuze and Guattari put this in terms of

microbrains: Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but every-where there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things(1994:213,emphasis added).

An ecology of thought, then, might begin with the idea that there are ecologies ofmicrobrains, with which our own brains are engaged, or which our own brains mightbe. Our own cognitive systems, perceptual systems and the world are even moreenmeshed within each other than we might often think, even more perhaps thandisciplines such as media ecology might sometimes limit themselves to thinking. Suchideas have become more common in the more interesting work of contemporarycognitive science, now it has begun to move away from good old-fashioned artificialintelligence (known generally as GOFAI) (Haugeland 1985:112) models for cogni-tion, those based generally on the idea that machines could replicate the assumedsymbolic processing of the human brain. Deleuze and Guattari might have approvedof this move away form GOFAI. They wrote that It is up to science to makeevident the chaos into which the brain itself, as subject of knowledge, plunges(1994:215-16).

In a culture that sometimes sees the brain as the last refuge from the network for theself, it is perhaps important to note that this chaos of the brain is about more than thebrain. No network, even an advanced network such as the brain, is a stand-alone

ecology. This is again where the shifting patterns of affective tone come in. Mood iseverywhere there is chaos waiting to be formed into patternsand this chaos is notonly in the brain but all the way through the nervous system and beyond. Deleuze andGuattari write that

[e]ven in a linear model like that of the conditioned reflex, Erwin Strauss hasshown that it was essential to understand the intermediaries, the hiatuses andgaps ... acentred systems, networks of finite automatons, chaoid states.(1994:215-16)

Here again, not only is the brain itself a collection of ecologies (many would say thatany brain is already a collection of brainsnot only housed in the skull but also in thearea of the enteric nervous system which thinks via gut feelings (Connolly 1999)). Itis complex ecology all the way up and down the lines of stimulus and response. In fact,lines seems the wrong concept. The entire nervous system is not quite the pre-formed, sharply ordered, and hierarchical medium that it is often taken for, one throughwhich messages might come smoothly in and out. Rather the nervous system in itsentirety is uncertain, probabilistic (Steven Rose in Deleuze and Guattari 1994:234),full of gaps and chaos at every point. As Deleuze and Guattari remark, this becomesmuch more noticeable when we move away from fixed habits and opinions and if, on

the contrary, we consider creative processes and the bifurcations they imply (216).

Attending to creative bifurcations leads us back to the importance of experimentalecologies, media arts, and some kind of conceptualization of media as differential


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media. Media arts make strange creative enhancements of the intensive differenceswithin the ecologies involved (between ants and actors, for example).

Such ecological intensity helps us to pay full attention to the mediations in which weare immersed. Instead of fixed entities interacting with other entities, we might begin

to see ourselves as a kind of strange weather interacting with other constellations ofstrange weather. Within and between these interacting weather systems we find nerv-ous systems, brains (micro and macro), media, and worlds. Yet not always exactlywhere we might expect to find themat least not limitedto where we might expect tofind them. For example, in works such as The Worlds Clockworlds, ants, and satellitecommunications become nervous system in the chaotic ecological sense discussedabove (see also Michael Taussig 1992). Or we might say that audience becomes nerv-ous system in this chaotic sense, the gallery a kind of collective brain.

Can we draw any lines easily here? This is the problemthe very disciplinary prob-

lemof discussing things not in terms of lines, but ecologically. This problem isperhaps the problem of our times. It is within the context of this problem that theimportance of specific performances arises. This is clear in The Worlds Clock, not justin the actors performances but also, we could say, the ants, or the technologytheperformance of inorganic life within the network. Performance, which here wouldhave to include the ongoing movement of relation (of mood) as much as action, bringsall these aspects of ecologies together andat the same time and in the same proc-essindividuates them. All performance is structure andchaos at the threshold of thedifferentials within the ecologies involved.

I would like to put this more clearly in terms of differential media. In media terms, wecould say that all media are differential, individuating media in so far as they performwithin ecologies. And, as we have seen with satellite communications, live video feeds,ants nests, or actors in art galleries, the immanent performance within/as ecologies isalways the most important aspect of media. This immanent performance of ecologiesis also the basis of political-social ecologies, the more so the more networked the worldbecomes. Anything else, as Whitehead might say, is an abstraction. To put this anotherway, ecologically all media are chaoid (that is, somewhere between chaos and struc-ture) at every point. There is no absolute outside to this chaoid mediation from whichto measure its sense, but only its ongoing creation of sense as intensive individuation.

Focussing on the performance of the various elements of media ecologies makes thisclear. In performance, lines dividing, for example, global/local break down (so thatsatellites, ants nests and art galleries thousands of miles apart are connected ecologi-cally). As many have noted, in performance other apparent opposites, such as tech-nique and thought or life, also begin to break down. Yet they do so not in general (in akind of general deconstruction), but specifically in processes of differentiation andindividuation.

This specificity feeds back into the ongoing emergence of other specificities. Media,by virtue of being mediathat is, connective, networkingenhance the intensity of

this process; hence the idea that networked media are indeed strange weather systems.Moreover, any media performance carries the structure of ongoing emergence that isa matter of weather within it. In fact, seen from the point of view of the rise of thenetwork society (Castells 2000), differentiating, performative mediation is crucial bothto the series of techno-social processes involved and to the series of new concepts that


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arise within networks. In academic terms, this might suggest the importance of thediscipline of media studies, even more so that of media ecologies. Yet it also suggeststhe dissolution of media studies (and media ecologies) into transversality.

In this dynamic ecological setting, interaction can be reconsidered as a media phe-

nomenon. The first step might be to consider that there is always a virtual structure tointeraction. I have previously suggested that there is a real virtuality forming a vitalcomponent of the objective world, as Manuel DeLanda puts it (2002:33). In consid-ering this real virtuality it would be necessary to rethink the transdisciplinary relationsof media events in terms of the virtual multiplicities (44) as well as their actualcomponents and representations and so on. To return to my main example, Verdensuretis not just a matter of the actual ecology of ants, actors, and satellite communications.It also individuates a virtual ecology of multiplicities, in terms of relations and in termsof the network of potentials the work involves.

The next question might be how the real actual and virtual specificities, with their realpotentials, arise as an interactive network. DeLanda asks how a population of multi-plicities can form a virtual continuum (44), for example, in the dynamism of space asvirtual space, or the dynamism of the ongoing individuation of actual time as acontinuum of virtual time, or the ongoing individuation of a particular networkedecology. In all this it would be crucial to avoid essentialist and, crucially for media andcultural studies, typological thinking. The real virtual continuum, and the networkedecologies it involves, provide the seat of an interaction that is more interesting than theoft-noted banality of interactive buttons. As with ants, satellites, and actors, intensivedifferences are genetic or creative, not pre-programmed.

Media arts in their ecological mode are often viewed as obscure or strange preciselybecause they seem so unstable and so specific at the same time. Yet they might bebetter models for all media events than more mainstream media such as the newseven for an understanding of how such mainstream media work. Although new mediasuch as Virtual Reality/Virtual Environments actively take this as their point of depar-ture, even in older-style media it is increasingly not so much the mimetic quality[the] representation of an action that matters. Rather what matters are the qualities ofmodulation (Murphie 2002:188) of affective tone (this is certainly true, for example,of so-called reality television).

At the same time, as I have just suggested, new media are more ecologically aware inthe terms described here. New media are new in their awareness and shifting of thedifferent thresholds of perception (193)5 afforded by networked ecologies. Thesenew media ecologies, with their awareness of the modulation of the materiality ofexpression, impact upon older media ecologies as much as they arise from them. Theresult is a proliferation of differentiations within all media expressions (the transforma-tions of screens, television show formats, of the function of personal images and thephotograph through digital cameras or video-enabled mobile phones).

In short, we are dealing with a media culture in which there is an increased awarenessthat all the virtual structures that invisibly inhabit networked ecologies produce dy-namic form and this feeds back into that which produces it. As Massumi writes it hasto be recognized that conditions of emergence change. Emergence emerges. Changingchanges (2002:10). This is famously true in every individual performance of an ecol-ogy, even if the technology or medium seems to remain the same.


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The response of much disciplinary thought to networked ecologies (aside from thosewho break with disciplinary thought, such as Innis, Massumi and so on) is at best anabstract approximation to the real and specific powers of the network society. In fact,the very notion of disciplinary thought itself is a strange one in such an interactive

and dynamic context. Thought is no longer a neat set of switches turning on and offwithin a pre-formed system (the classic GOFAI model mentioned previously). It israther, as many have noted, an electrical storm. This is a storm in which the ecologiesare again hard to delimit, as thought-as-electrical storm is also a storm interacting withother storms. Rodney Brooks has noted that thought is not only an electrical storm,but, in the brain at least, an electrical storm taking place in a hormonal soup (1991a:14).Or, to mix the metaphors even more, Gerald Edelman compares the conditions ofcognition to those of a rainforest. Such ideas form an important part of the work ofmany media artists. A good example would be George Legradys Equivalents II(1992),where installation viewers type sentences that the installation then turns into images of

clouds.Here again we need to broaden the notion of a medium. To put it rather bluntly,networked media signal the end of the traditional delimited (and broad) notions ofmedia we have known for the best part of a hundred years. We perhaps need moremalleable concepts of media, such as found not only in media ecology, but in manyartists work, such as John Cages playing of an amplified cactus needle with a feather,or his piece Whether/Weather (1992). In the latter, the piece was to be performedoutdoors and simply cancelled if it rained. Cage said I am willing to give myself overto weather. I like to think of my music as weather, as part of the weather (Retallack

1994:244).Thinking in terms of ecologies should be a way of reconsidering the nature of the field,and of our relation to fields in general. This also applies to media production. A goodexample is the nightly news, which can be compared to more radical media artspractices.

Containing Networked Ecologies

If one forgets momentarily about ideology, information, and so forth, and looks at the

news as a performance, it often begins to look rather strange. Where I live in Sydneythere are many newsreaders, especially late at night, who seem to smile happily throughfast-paced lists of catastrophes. In addition, there is a strange faciality in the immobil-ity of the reading of the newssomething that often seems accompanied by eyes thatlook a little wild, as if the entire world is pouring through them. In the terms ofDeleuze and Guattari:

The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off it; itconstitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the holethat subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole

of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye.

Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that constitutes thewall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the concrete face,vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely begins to appear in theblack hole. (1987:168)


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In an effect perhaps enhanced by cosmetics, newsreaders often seem to have abnor-mally wide-open eyes (simultaneously black holes and white walls), and for me thisbegins to suggest that the news is fascinating for similar reasons to The Worlds Clock.The news opens itself to the chaos of the world and then tries to tie down this chaos

through the application of very strict performance parameters. Yet the news attemptsthis in a very different way, for different reasons and with opposite results to TheWorlds Clock.

The news frames the world, the face of the newsreader, and the viewer, but there isalways an excess to this framing, as there is to the faciality so framed. This is whatreally grabs the viewer, constitutes both viewer and newsreader in relation to the affec-tive intensities of the networked ecology in which they find themselves. In the readingof the news the performance that emerges is simultaneously measured, constricted,and somewhat wildalmost at times a kind of mania.

The strictness of these parameters begins to explain the uneasy mood of the news(beyond even the terrible information we are given). Events, all events but especiallythose the news deals with, are not to be contained. We could say that events are deeplyecological. In fact, the faciality of the newsreader suggests that the attempt to containevents ongoing emergence within highly regulated structures only emphasizes the dy-namism of what moves through this structure (we could say the same about disciplinarityin general).

What would we call this dynamic excess? Affect? An ecology of ecologies? What Massumicalls worlding, in which the self-network is a worlding of the human (2002:128)?

Here, certainlysubject and object integrate into a greater autonomy or participation, a matter-manner meld adding a new line of multiple-singular encounter to the world: thatof a technic, an artificed between of any number of possible subjects and objects,autonomous of any given particular subject or object. (Massumi 1997:755)

In the wild but forced stare of the newsreaderat the camera, at the prompter, per-hapsit is as if the worlding of the world moves not so much to me from the newsreader, as through them, and through me. In the process it invokes a mood or affective

tone via the media ecologies in which everything participates: events, news reader,camera, broadcasting, viewer, and so on. It would be pleasant to think that this moodhad something to do with compassion for the world, but this seems not to be the case.Rather the oft-noted mood is that of an emergent panic.

I would tentatively suggest that this panic is precisely to do with the more fully obviousecological nature of the worlds into which the news brings us. Put simply it is not onlythe representation of events that panics us. It is the confrontation with the intensity ofecology itself. Thinking ecologically is not always pleasant, especially in the absence ofappropriate transversal concepts or transductive processes. Ecologies are not alwaysinherently ethical there is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds(Bateson in Guattari 2001:27). Some ecologies bring us into particular individuationsof intensity that we could do without. Furthermore, the effect of these intensiveindividuations is not the correlate to the representations involved, although the contra-


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diction between intensity and representational framing might increase the feeling ofpanic. This panic even at the very contradiction of ecological intensity and framemight be a critical response of the body to its individuations in the ecology of the news.

If intensity makes its way to the heart of the performances involved in the news, as a

set of differential forces ecologically nudging my performance as viewer as much as thenewsreaders performance, it might be here that we could seek an ethics and politics.This excess is one of the main conditions of a politics worked through the ongoingdifferentiations of media events. Massumi has described (in another context) theuncontrolled conditions of [memorys] emergence here, the way in which interac-tions of the objective dimensions [can be] interfered with and modulated by anunconsciously emotional charge (2002:222). This excess moving through the ob-jective dimensions of an interaction such as the news is what gives the interaction itsappearance of the anomalous. This excess is life but also strangenessthe uncannynature of ecological drift, sometimes accompanied by false promises of containmentin tighter and tighter, politically useful structures. Globalization, in its current eco-nomic and political forms, is as much about these promised constrictions of excess asit is about openings and flows. Thus the network society itself at times seems opposed tothe concept of networked ecologies when the latter do not meet certain requirements.

Yet in the news both constriction and excess seem intensified the more the face is heldstill. Perhaps the reason for this is the depersonalizing nature of the rigidly held face,the wide open eyes. It heads towards the impersonal, the event, the fullness of ecologiesthat open up once we forego recognition.

Which leads me, again drawing on the work of Massumi, to quickly pose an ecology ofperception in interactive art/media ecologiesone that takes into account the direct-ness of emergence, of excess. I think that one of the important aspects of new mediaarts is enacting this excess consciously, although I am not suggesting that media artsare always good in these respects, or that the news and popular media are bad. Ofcourse, the media arts approach is found throughout popular mediain electronicmusic culture just to take one example (and not all newsreaders are quite so wild-eyed).

The Suggestiveness of Emergence, of Excess

We can compare the attempted constriction discussed above to Joyce Hinterding andDavid Hainess digital video installation, The Blinds and the Shutters (2001). In thisinstallation the four walls of the gallery are covered by screens allowing high resolutiondigital images of a decidedly modernist house set amidst bushland. Slowly the contentsof the housefurniture, television sets, and so onfloat out through the windows anddoors, across the bushland and around the viewer. It is a surrealism that somehowcaptures the everyday excess of our complex ecological engagements.

Here the idea is that the everyday is not contained within an exacerbated interior (as inthe news with its small set, and rigid reader) but set loose precisely from interiors. Thenews closes (or attempts to close) the open events it confronts. The Blinds and theShutters, like many fine media artworks, sets free the closedhere literally on thescreens but also in terms of the entire mood. Hinterding is indeed well-known for anapproach to technology as a form of opennessoften precisely to the weather, or as


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she puts it, to electricity we didnt make (quoted in Lumby 1993:51). In anotherwork, Levitation Grounds (2000-2002), Hinterding and Haines combined 3D im-agery, and digital post together with satellite images received from passing weathersatellites.

Such strange ecologies are not only very beautiful art works. They broaden our notionof media theory and give greater scope to our consideration of the ecological contextsof media. And this broadening of our notion of media through strange ecologieswithin artworks has, of course, a history. I will just hint at this via a work such asJoseph Beuyss Honey Pump at the Workplace. In this work, several hundred gallons ofhoney was pumped through see-through tubes that ran from the basement to theroof while another motor rotated a crankshaft coated in thick layers of fat (Stachelhaus1991:164). In a room through which all the honey passed Beuys held discussions for ahundred days about his ideas for a Free International University.

With Beuys we are reminded once again of the importance of the performance as bodyand the body as performance (from ants to actors to newsreaders to bodies of honeythat galvanize strange ecologiesone could also consider the embodiment of video inthe video installation space). Massumi writes that In absolutely every instance oftactile perception a [proprioceptive] awareness of ones body stands between one andawareness of the tactile object (2002:266). This perceptive awareness is here taken tobe an awareness within the world, rather than the barrier to our knowledge of theworld it is often taken for, from at least Kant onward. This performative aspect of thebody takes us away from an aesthetic teleology of either ends or means that informsmuch politics, media and cultural. It takes us to something more ecological. As Harald

Szeeman has pointed out with regard to Beuys, the lateral (ecological) connections areso much more important in his work than impossible teleologies. For Szeeman, thismakes Beuyss work a non-teleological, connective time-machine of raging fire(1994:35). This time machine reworks time in the present through these lateral con-nections.

For an example of this drawn from contemporary media technologies, consider theclocks that coordinate all the components of computing but are especially foregroundedin the use of MIDI to coordinate digital musical instruments and events, or in non-linear digital video editing. These clocks are not just coordinating the progress of

linear time, but are powerful agents of lateral connection. Synchronization in general isa profoundly ecological event, and one subject to reworking with every subsequentsynchrony, each of which literally remakes time.

Again it is interaction, long since rejected in new media theory as a basis for ethics,that returns, now in its full ecological sense. Interaction becomes not the provision ofpre-formed choices but the provision of a plan of interactionone with strategies,systems and techniques that enhance participation in ecologies. Deleuze suggests that one

think in terms of speeds and slownesses, of frozen catatonias and accelerated

movements, unformed elements, nonsubjectified effects.... It is a matter of onespractical conception of the plan. (1988:129)

Think of von Triers plan in The Worlds Clock, the nightly news, or Hinterding andHainess plan in Levitation Grounds, or Beuyss plan for Honey Pump. In each case, theresult is that:


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Every territory, every habitat, joins up not only its spatiotemporality but aposture and a song for example, a song and a color, percepts and affects. Andevery territory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species, orintercepts the trajectories of animals without territories, forming interspecies

junction points. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:185)Where do these interspecies junction pointsbetween ants and actors, newsreadersand viewers, or honey and pacificist ex-Stuka pilots such as Beuysleave us?

Components of Passage

Firstly, it seems to me that media ecologies call for a concept like transversality notonly to describe but to encourage that which crosses fields and brings them together innew ways without sacrificing their diversity. Secondly, we could suggest that in media

arts, as Guattari puts it, there is a transductive play with what he calls the machinicunconscious, defined as the machinic ecology of assemblages (1979:231). The task ofmedia arts would be to return us to the putting in play of the components of passagein such a manner that they are susceptible to intervention. As Gary Genosko putsit, this requires both connection and an acknowledgement of specific, real circum-stances.

A transdisciplinary assemblage must explore its transversality, initiating new andmultiplying existing connections between science-society-ethics-aesthetics-politics, while struggling against reductionist versions of this process that have

become increasingly pegged on profit, or accepting of multidisciplinary fuzzinesswithout real institutional commitments. (2003:138)

Which is perhaps to ask simply: What are the specifics of media events if mediationcomes first, not after that which it mediates?

The fields of mediation I am emphasising in interactive ecologies are even importantto the world of communicationsfor to communicate, there must be fields in whichcommunication can take place. Indeed communication is arguably an intersection offields rather than a transfer of messagesleading to what we could call ecologies of

transversalities.

Lobsters on the March

A strange model for this approach to media and other ecologies might be lobsters onthe march. Here, a bit like the lobsters following each other by their tails, I followGenosko (2002) following Deleuze and Guattaris own following of no less than JacquesCousteauwho is, of course, attempting to follow the lobsters.

To avoid the hurricane season, lobsters go on the march. They begin assembling before

the first winter storms (and before human instruments can detect any storms) (Deleuzeand Guattari 1987:549). With the first storm, they form single-file queues of two tofifty, depending on whom you read. Lobsters are most vulnerable around the middle,and they quite literally link up with each other, each lobsters pincers protecting thevulnerable middles of the lobsters in front. They cross the sand at up to five metres a


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minute and in their journey to deep waters may travel 80 kilometres. The leader isperiodically relieved. As Genosko points out, the march is connected with cosmicforces, and tellurian impulses (2002:53). So they are somewhat cosmic lobsters.

I shall just suggest some of the other ecologies this resonates with for me. These lobster

marches seem to resonate here with The Worlds Clock, with fragile and fractal nervoussystems, with bodies in ecologies of performance. The lobsters also resonate for mewith temporary ecologies of the nervous system in response to the weather, with ourprotective links to and cultural ecologies derived from the weather. There is also per-haps a resonance with the mediated and messy transmission of information, as if thelines of lobsters are like a message (a message again in the nervous system, or perhapsin the network). Yet this is a message without meaning. Instead the message is aboutconnecting things and moving them, as an adjustment to a complex field. In otherwords this is message as mood. And finally, of course, we find the blending of the threeecologies in a most striking way, in which the interaction of social, self and environ-ment leads to new emergences for all three.

For others, there are other resonances. Deleuze and Guattari even claim that God isa lobster (1987:40). By which I think that they mean that life is made of a doublepincer, a double bind, maybe one like that of structure and emergence.

In a networked world we are all are subject to increasingly strange, and yet increasinglyeveryday ecologies. These are ecologies in which the trick is to keep movement justcoherent enough to avoid the worst aspects of the storms at the edges of ones ownecology, but just loose enough so that sticking to the script does not get you killed.

Notes

I am grateful to Lone Bertelsen for invaluable advice on the events discussed in thisarticle and feedback on the article itself.

1. Socius (Lacan): a body without organs that constitutes a society.

2. I shall describe technics here simply as a combination of technologies, systematicprocesses and techniques, whether these are found in the organization of living or non-

living matter.3.

The term differential describes cultures and technologies that are based uponthe in-betweenIt is also meant to imply the end of media as clearly boundforms (film, TV, etc) or genres. The term differential signifies that, now morethan ever, media tend to constantly differentiate themselves in an ongoingprocess. This is not just a response to a cultural/natural environment.Differential media also involve the creation of this environment.... ForManovich, computers and culture constantly change one another. This leadsto a speeding up and instability of both computer media and cultural forms

and processes.... Differential mediaand for that matter differential-basedtechnics, do not then just enhance connections but draw our attention todifference as intensity, to movement, to sensation, to ongoing affects. Theydraw our attention to the world as our perceptual frames (frames that are


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technical and natural at the same time) are not normally structured to seeit. This is the world not as data but as modulation. (Murphie, 2003:151-152)

4. I am grateful to some interesting comments by an anonymous reviewer of this article.They noted that my questions echo Harold Inniss question: Why we attend to the

things to which we attend? (Innis 1971:xvii). The ongoing and intensive modulation ofstructures of attention would be a crucial aspect of differential media (see note above)and of the network. There is an enormous burden of debt here to the work of Innis, thediscipline of media ecology, and to those such as Massumi who have led beyond it. Mydifference with Innis might be, as the anonymous reviewer has pointed out, that insteadof looking backwards to the oral tradition to provide us with a sense of balance, we arein a meshwork of selves, socius, and environment where the borders are always criss-crossed.

5. So that the predicate-as event of VR, that which forms the virtual dynamism for allthe instantiations of VR equipment, environments and events, is the modulation of

modulation the threshold of perception is itself subject to a massive broadening of itsown limits we are brought to the knowledge of the power of [direct] modulation(Murphie 2002:194), rather than the power of representation or even ideology.

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