Fibreculture Journal 17: Unnatural Ecologies (2011)

Media ecology has always resonated with discussions of digital and networked media. Perhaps this is because the discipline of media ecology has always been so open to transdisciplinary work. The pioneers of media ecology set off very early on the road to transdiscplinary critique that is a key focus for the Fibreculture Journal. Indeed, media ecological critique is often critique in the best sense: the exploration of the limits, not just the errors of thinking, the immersion of thought in real events and practices, and the creation of new ideas appropriate to the present and future of media. All in all, from Innis and McLuhan on, media ecology has provided a generative engine within media thinking and practice. Indeed it has been exemplary thinking as practice.

Yet the leading scholars writing for the Unnatural Ecologies issue do not perform media ecology as we have known it. At times the articles argue with more “traditional” media ecology. Sometimes, they arrive at a new media ecology, having travelled other trajectories that those of traditional media ecology. They are rewriting media ecology, exploring its limits from inside and outside. In the process the Fibreculture Journal believes this issue makes a crucial contribution to thinking about all media from the perspective of digital and networked media. In thinking through the unnatural ecologies that contemporary media make increasingly obvious, the issue challenges us to rethink not only what media are, or what they do, but what they might have been, and what they have done.

Articles:
Michael Goddard: Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Olga Goriunova: Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Jussi Parikka: Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Matteo Pasquinelli: Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matthew Fuller: Faulty Theory
Phoebe Moore: Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production

Issue edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, April 2011
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Sarai Readers 01-07 (2001-2007)

Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers, 2007

Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversations, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half forgotten agendas. we hope our text this year sets the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the boundaries, parameters and verges of our times.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, 2006

Sarai Reader 06 uses ‘Turbulence’ as a conceptual vantage point from which to interrogate all that is in the throes of terminal crisis, and to invoke all that is as yet unborn. It seek to examine ‘turbulence’ as a global phenomenon, unbounded by the arbitrary lines that denote national and state boundaries in a ‘political’ map of the world. It wants to see areas of low and high pressure in politics, economy and culture that transcend borders, to investigate the flow of information and processes between downstream and upstream sites in societies and cultures globally.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan + Geert Lovink
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 2005

‘Bare Acts’ looks at ‘Acts’- at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of doing things in society and culture. The Reader foregrounds explorations of borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the legal regulation of sexuality and trespasses of various kinds.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi + Geert Lovink
Guest Editor: Lawrence Liang
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 04: Crisis / Media, 2004

The 2004 Reader produced by Sarai, is devoted to the dual themes of crisis reporting in the media, and the crisis within the media when it comes to the reportage of violence. Crisis pervades the times we live, and becomes palpable entity in itself. To acknowledge the pervasiveness of the crisis in our times, is also to engage with the media through which crisis, and the representation of crisis, become the ‘substance of our morning’s meditations’.

Editorial collective: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi & Awadhendra Sharan [Sarai] + Geert Lovink

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Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, 2003

“Shaping Technologies ” sets out to ratchet our engagement with the contemporary moment a notch higher, in directions that are sober, exhilarating and discomfiting, all at once. The book brings to the fore a series of situations and predicaments that mark the encounter between people and machines, between nature and culture, and between knowledge and power.

Editorial collective: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai], Geert Lovink, Marleen Stikker [Waag]

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Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, 2002

This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world.

Editors: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta

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Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, 2001

Sarai Reader 01, (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a sovereign entity that comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope of the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor.

Editors: Raqs Media Collective (Sarai) + Geert Lovink (Waag)

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Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi

Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, Neil Stammers (eds.): Global Activism, Global Media (2005)

“Radical political activist movements are growing all the time. To reach a wider audience each organisation has formed networks and websites, exploiting new communications technologies as well as conventional media to get its message across. This is often very successful: activist politics have come to influence ‘mainstream’ politics over fundamental issues such as trade, gender relations, the environment and war. This book brings together activists and academics in one volume, to explore the theory and practice of global activism’s relation to all forms of media, mainstream and otherwise. The contributors examine how global activism is represented in the mainstream press and explain the strategies that activists adopt to spread their own ideas. Investigating Indymedia and internet activism, they show how transformations in communications technology offer new possibilities, and explain how activists have successfully used and developed their own media. Case studies and topics include the world social forums, an example of a campaign from the NGO Action Aid, a campaign strategy from an internet activist, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar conflict, the World Development Movement and representations in the mainstream press, the Independent Media Centre, transgender activism on the net, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the internet.”

Publisher Pluto Press, 2005
ISBN 0745321968, 9780745321967
235 pages

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