Media-Ecologies of Sensing (working title)
Through the contested development and implementation of algorithmic mediatechnologies, practices of computation not only undergo further change, but also gain a new form of dominance. The embedding of multi-sensory and networked computing devices into various fields and registers effects reconfigurations of relations in onto-epistemological, socio-political and ethico-aesthetic terms, and thus modifies the ways in which partialities and shared realities are constituted.
In my research, I investigate practices of ‘un/making sense’ through mediatechnologies in the realms of selected case studies that are centered around art works or productions moving in the border areas to the arts since the 1960s. In the course of this interdisciplinary project, I argue that practices of computation are powerful precisely because their limited capacity emerges from their embeddedness in the world. Computational assemblages are historically shaped and their specific practices and arrangements are socio-political—they participate in, and are not opposed to, reconfigurations of materialization processes, relations, and modes of thought. Hence, this also means that feasibility, operativity, generativity, and agentiality alone are not sufficient criteria to legitimate and assess algorithmic media cultures. The extent to which, when, and for whom media constellations of computation appear to be un/meaningful, ir/relevant, and in/appropriate thus becomes a matter that not only requires constant questioning and re-evaluation, but also relies on non-computational modalities orientating towards accountability and responsibility.
‘Media-ecologies’ here refers to the circumstances under which contemporary mediatechnologies are no longer to be considered as things or objects within an environment, but are themselves to be understood as ecologies on the side, and on the other side it refers to thinking in an ecological sense, which efforts to also account for the destructive and degenerative forces and politics that operate through and with computational media technologies.
Being enacted by conceptual and material infrastructures that make algorithmic mediatechnologies operational, computation crucially partakes in the establishment of a ‘neocybernetic’ regime and a power acting in an environmental manner: the governing and management of semiotic-material relations through mediated computational practices. Computation’s privileged role within this ‘neocybernetic’ regime is guaranteed by two aspects: First, computing is a practice that engenders ‘contact zones’ between heterogeneous modes of becoming, between bodies and machines, living and non-living entities. For example, the interpretation of rhythms of in/activity of matter (such as electronic signals) as a practice of calculating enables a modality of communication between biological and geological spheres. Second, computation functions as a coding practice that allows for complex intermedial arrangements. Here, computation works as an ‘intermediary’ between different modes like tactilities, languages, images, sounds. Both notions introduce computation as a ‘reliability’—in the sense that these divergent and entangled practices are able to constitute relations that might become durable when re-enacted.
If attachments structure relationality and reality is relationally constituted, then the question arises as to which material, conceptual, and imaginary assemblages realize computation as an addressable phenomenon, as well as how and what is thereby de/attached.
