YoHa, et al.: Evil Media Distribution Centre (2013)

“Evil Media Distribution Centre is a response to the book Evil Media (2012) by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey. In that book the authors argue for a broader notion of media and a deeper, more complex understanding of how these grey media influence the way we behave, think and perceive.

‘Grey media’ produce the working environment of administrators, professionals, delivery operatives and arranges the movements and work-arounds of everyone from chief executives to intellectuals or cleaners. They are the background to contemporary society. Using them, getting round their failures, exploiting their specific qualities, forms part of the necessary knowledge of the present day. These things mediate, transform, encode, filter and translate relations. Fuller and Goffey include a broad definition of media to include things like middle management, neurotropic or suppressant drugs that treat the body as an information system, alongside things such as queuing systems or specific algorithms or data–structures.

Assisted by Transmediale, Tom Keene, Anna Blumenkranz and other members of the Open Systems Association, YoHa (Graham Harwood & Matsuko Yokokoji) had invited people to write a text of one hundred words about an object, its genealogy, any key factors that make it amenable to manipulation. This text was then presented together with the object in a cabinet of curiosities that at the same time evoked associations with a distribution centre. A key fact of grey media is its ready quality of dryness, one bordering temptingly on boredom and this is something we asked people to maintain when writing the text.

The project has been installed at Transmediale 2013 in Berlin and The Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam.” (from YoHa’s statement)

Review: Stephen Fortune (2013).

28 contributions presented in video
All 51 contributions presented in text (use menu on the left)

Jacques Monod: Chance and Necessity (1970–) [FR, EN, DE, RO, IT]

In this classic book, Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod interprets the processes of evolution to show that life is only the result of natural processes by “pure chance”. The basic tenet of this book is that systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic biofeedback loops can be explained without having to invoke final causality. (from Wikipedia)

Publisher Seuil, Paris, 1970
197 pages

English edition
Translated by Austryn Wainhouse
Publisher Vintage, 1971
199 pages

Reviews and commentaries: Bernard Strauss & Erica Aronson (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 1972), R.J. Hernstein (Commentary, 1972), F. Eugene Yates & Arthur S. Iberall (Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 1973), Danny Yee (1994), Oren Harman (LA Review of Books, 2014).

Le Hasard et la Nécessité (French, 1970, 7 MB)
Chance and Necessity (English, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 1971, 29 MB, no OCR)
Zufall und Notwendigkeit (German, trans. Friedrich Griese, 1977)
Hazard si necesitate (Romanian, trans. Sergiu Sararu, 1991, 15 MB)
Il caso e la necessità (Italian, 1997, 7 MB)

James J. Gibson: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979–) [EN, RU]

“James J. Gibson (1904–1979) is one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, best known for his work on visual perception. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his first major work was The Perception of the Visual World (1950) in which he rejected behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work. In his later works, including The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), Gibson became more philosophical and criticized cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before, arguing strongly in favor of direct perception and direct realism, as opposed to cognitivist indirect realism. He termed his new approach ‘ecological psychology’.”

“He moved from thinking about what patterns could act as stimuli to rethinking the concept of the stimulus itself, ultimately rejecting “stimulus” in favor of his version of “information.” In a 1960 paper that is a classic in its own right, Gibson carefully surveyed the patch work of meanings of the term “stimulus” that could be found in the literature. He concluded that the optical (or acoustic, or haptic etc.) patterning that would best correspond to actual perceiving in the world no longer seemed like a “stimulus” at all in any proper sense. Instead, he proposed a common-sense usage of the term “information” (as opposed to the technical usage of Shannon) which was fairly well developed by that time. By information, Gibson meant structured energy that was information about environmental sources, in contrast to information as structure in an information theoretical sense which implies a sender and a receiver. Gibson’s information is specific to its environmental sources though not a replica or a copy. It certainly is not a stimulus in the sense of energy that triggers a response. Gibson’s information does not come to the animal. The animal goes to it, actively obtaining the information. Part 2 of this volume develops this concept of information and is at the heart of Gibson’s theory.” (from the Introduction)

“Gibson’s legacy is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in psychology, particularly those considered to be post-cognitivist.”

Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1979
This edition, Psychology Press, 2014
ISBN 9781315740218
315 pages

Reviews and commentaries: E. Bruce Goldstein (Leonardo, 1981), Frederick A. Jules (1984), A. P. Costall (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1984), Maurizio Ferraris (1999, IT), William M. Mace (Ethics & the Environment, 2005).

Wikipedia, FR
Publisher
WorldCat

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (English, 1979/2014, 4 MB)
Ekologicheskiy podchod k zritelnomu vospriyatiyu (Russian, trans. T.M. Sokolskoy, 1988, 11 MB)

For more on Gibson see Monoskop wiki.