Matthew Fuller

Interview by Simon Mills

SM: Can you say a little about your background with regard to investigating Media? How did you come to get so involved with the cultural aspects of technology?

MF: Probably the equivalent to somebody shouting ‘Fire!’ the natural stupid thing to do is to run towards it.

SM: I’m interested in how you see artists and critics practice has changed over the past 10 years with regard to New Media. I remember being at the Virtual Futures conference in Warwick in 1995, which I believe you also attended, and being amazed at the delirium surrounding the technoculture scene. It was difficult not to be caught up in it. What is your perception of that era? How much do you think things having changed since then?

MF: So, this caused me to check out on the web what actually did go on to find if there is anything that tallies with my memory of these events. There are a few documents from the three Virtual Futures conferences available online. I think these conferences were really far-sighted attempts to bring people together from different fields, maths, science fiction, media art, different branches of philosophy, literary studies, music, virus writing, speculative science and so on. They are very much still the kind of event that, I believe, makes things happen.

Clearly there was a particularly interesting conjuncture of different social currents going on more broadly: jungle music, now a standardised genre running under another name, but at that point a fundamentally inventive and simultaneously hardcore sound springing from the part of London I was living in, and which was at times blasting out of every window; the contestation of the criminal justice act that had been passed in 1994; the sustained explosion of zine culture; the very beginnings of the massification of the internet; the availability of computing tools such as HTML and Macromind Director as well as BBS systems; Queer; the building momentum in fields such as artificial life and non-linear dynamics; the then still ongoing collapse of state communism; and, crucially as far as Virtual Futures was concerned, some very brilliant writing and thinking especially that taking up and reworking the imaginary and vocabulary of cyberpunk and its precursor science fictions, and also the reception of Deleuze and Guattari coming out of places like Warwick and Birmingham Universities at that time. Writing this list is to conjoin things of many different scales and kinds of significance, but they are some of the things that characterise that moment for me.

I think there was a historical juncture at which several different parts of culture, including the above, had expanded, making certain kinds of thinking, dancing, computing and communication possible at a point before which they were normalised. The political question then was to take that opportunity to invent as much as possible, to create such a sense of expectation and participation that it would be difficult to fit a straight-jacket over reality once that conjunction moved on. At the same time, you need to be sharp enough to have an in-built critique to sense the moments where things are being sold short, the expanding sense of the possible gets clogged by bullshit, or, as for instance with the networks, to keep an eye out for how other dynamics that may also be operating in these spheres, those of capital and the state, dampen things down or accelerate and seed certain kinds of patterns at the expense of others.

It’s necessary to keep doing, to look for, or make, such kind of situations. It was a historical juncture that forced people to go radically interdisciplinary to understand it, equally, in order to make it happen, it was essential to work in several directions at once. The strands from philosophy which fed into this were already the kinds of thinkers working in this kind of way.

SM: It’s obvious how this interdisciplinarity affects your writing. For example in Media Ecologies you analyse media using the machinic phylum as opposed to hylomorphism, which you associate with traditional cultural studies, thus allowing for a fuller account of potential media practices. I have two questions regarding this. Do you see Media and Cultural studies as somehow stuck in a rut with their focus on the creation and consumption of messages? And what has been your experience of undertaking interdisciplinary research within an academic environment? It’s something that’s often talked about but often difficult to realise.

MF: Well, the identification of hylomorphism isn’t with canonical cultural studies per se, but a particular moment in its adoption of Shannon and Weaver’s information theory. The text particularly referred to is Stuart Hall’s Encoding / Decoding. (Hall’s argument was with that school of communication studies which just saw communication as a matter of shunting data from one place to another.) What this text usefully does is to politicise the moment of reception especially, but also to note that each phase in the transition of material from one point to another in media systems articulates what is transferred in certain ways. These phases are composed by different workplace roles, techniques, ideological formations, understandings of accountability, visual and linguistic norms and so on. This is useful stuff because it allows us to disarticulate, but at the same time see modes of conjunction at operation in media. Where it is hylomorphic is in its adoption of a form / content model which de-emphasises or blocks the capacity for reality creation, for deregulation, rather than for the careful mapping of regulation. Media Ecologies is, I hope, a text that is based on
materiality rather than law.

The academic context I work in at the moment is that of an art school, (The Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam http://www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/) that is to say, an environment primarily centred on production rather than reception, a place where digital materiality is of core concern. The approach we take is to understand media design as a problematic rather than a fixed discipline. We’re certainly lucky in that it isn’t yet. By ‘media’ we understand computational and networked digital media in particular, but also their inter-relation with other, perhaps older media systems, as well as the contexts that connect with them and articulate their meaning. By design, we understand a coupling of thought, in all its forms, with action. This is a pretty broad definition! But what it allows us to do is draw students from many different contexts towards working on these questions: mathematicians, graphic designers, political activists, performers, cartographers, sociologists, artists and others. This working context forces a very heterogeneous but un-vague understanding of the possibilities of media design. This heterogeneity becomes something necessary to reflect also in the research work done here and has itself provided a focus of attention, as for instance in the recent symposium Design Documents looking at the actual stuff of interdisciplinary communication, what anthropologists would call its boundary objects. Here we are also looking at the question of antidisciplinary thought and work. This is essential within art’s paradoxical self-formulation as a discipline or mode of activity involving training and a notion of the inheritance of historical dynamics crossing generations, but one which is also always exploding out of itself, that is predicated upon breaking its boundaries, and at the same time on the production of boundary objects for the understanding of things that will never be disciplined.

Equally, we should consider the forms of knowledge and collaboration, their circulation and enaction that will be and are required to deal with the various economic and ecological crash-points that we are currently going through the first phases of: such as climate change; the loss of fossil fuels; and the conflicts that are forced upon the world as global elites attempt to hold onto their resources and privilege. Remaining within one’s discipline, whether that is as an artist or astrophysicist is not an option.

SM: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the necessity for a heterogeneous understanding of media design. Have you seen this as also having an affect on what it means to be an artist?

MF: This is a question that is looked at to a certain extent in the short book that is being brought out in a while by Huddersfield’s Digital Research Unit, (Softness) . In this, I’m interested in the question of ‘Art methodologies’, modes of thinking and perceiving that had at certain times been peculiar to art, such as reflexivity; a certain kind of freedom, or the ability to take every part of an occurrence, an event, an object and the way it is viewed and used into account in its reinvention; attention to materiality; the commitment to experiment ‘live’, with life, rather than under lab conditions. These amongst others form art methodologies. What I can see occurring now more generally as a condition to be tested and used is that these have migrated from art practice specifically, into other parts of life. The media systems of art, such as galleries, user/audience networks, certain kinds of ways of looking and thinking, magazines and information circulation mechanisms, particular attention shaping devices such as press releases, books, ‘exhibitions’, and other formations are often retained as points of contact with the kinds of networks that they afford, but they are no longer the home-base or the capturing device for people operating with such art methodologies.

Certainly there are many precursors for such an idea. John Latham, Barbera Steveni and others’ work around the Artists’ Placement Group and O+I establishing the idea of the incidental person; various avant gardes from Russian Futurism to figures such as Alan Kaprow, or the groups that Stewart Home writes about in The Assault on Culture have formulated different modalities for the integration and re-invention of art and life. What is crucial is that the special techniques of art have become detached from particular persons, artists per se, and become available as devices in a more diffuse way. That’s a pretty interesting situation, with many complications!

SM: This kind of ties in with something I was going to ask you about and that is the question of archiving. There’s been quite a lot debate and activity regarding archiving recently with the realisation that digital art is actually more vulnerable to being lost than most other forms of artwork due to the rapid obsolescence of file formats etc. For example some of the first issues of I/O/D are only playable on Mac OS9 and below and of course the kind of art practices you mention in the previous question deal with a certain amount of ephemerality as well. Do you see archiving as an issue that needs to be addressed?

The question of archiving digital art strikes me as posing a problem which is something similar to the distinction between paleontology and biology. Can we imagine dinosaurs or the mammals who returned to the sea to become cetaceans planning to lie down in exactly the right patch of mud to ensure their best fossilisation? Olga Goriunova put it very well recently, speaking about software art she said that, "Art also has the right to die." Things go, they fall away, patterns of work and life however, they keep going, at least for a while, that’s what is interesting. Reflection upon those patterns, memory, historical consciousness is of course also folded in to them causing a recursion. Objects and entities from the past allow one to cut into the present, or in fact, they do it without help. How do we remember the Chernobyl explosion? It remembers itself, on its own behalf. (Like Alexander Kluge says, how can we imagine a political body or political subject, which can deal with the time of decay of nuclear waste, around 300,000 years? Societies that develop such systems must imagine themselves capable of doing so.) Artefacts are like instruments which allow you to perceive and come into combination with what your ordinary consciousness is not equipped for. Geiger counters are one example, climate modelling systems and simulations are another. If we didn’t save climate and weather records we would have had fewer means of understanding the current crises and the steps that must be taken to integrate human societies and technologies with the planet they exist on.

Memory systems and devices have some of the same quality, they also help us lock into norms. Can we compare the effect of interrelationship with the past presented on the one hand, by the statue of the first world war general Douglas Haig in London’s Whitehall, and on the other, by a painting by Pieter Brueghel the elder, say Netherlandish Proverbs? The one is massive, bronze and absolutely rotten in every respect whilst the other is intensely interactive, disporting bodies passions, stuff, muck, things – from sea monsters to pancakes – in an amazing web of interconnections, all designed to make us remember a set of proverbs we have (probably) never heard – so it fails as a mnemonic device – but which cuts into the normal reality of the user to make them feel, taste and enter into the model of the life of his time that the painter sets out.

These questions are those of memory, how they are established, each memory is an intervention, not simply something that occurs naturally. At the same time, as an artist, one is concerned with what needs to be made now, in the present. There’s a very palpable repulsiveness about some of the language with which artists describe themselves and their work as already existing for the sake of posterity. And on an institutional level, it’s so much about storing work on a ‘national’ level, this in particular is a betrayal of the kinds of work that depends upon the refusal of such boundaries. So frankly, it’s not a question that I’ve concerned myself with much in the way of producing answers, programmes, depots and fireproof boxes. What’s more interesting are the more general conditions of memory in the mind, between people, in objects and in society. What would be the implication of being able to store your every kiss, to archive every qualia associated with it and to be able to reproduce them? It makes you want to spit.

Isn’t there something very sad about the collections of Fluxus work held in museums, for instance in Tate Modern? This is stuff that was designed to be mass-produced (as much as could be afforded at least) and to get distributed and into peoples’ hands fast, to be light, insightful, funny and fast: poetry. Now it sits as precious yellow batches of lightly acidic dust in waiting. It’d be nice to see a way of storing this material which makes it new every time – there’s a lot to be said for what ubuweb are doing in that respect! The aspect of theft, of piracy, or breaking IP regimes in order to get stuff out that must be read now, and not before 70 years waiting time is up. It’s brilliant. There’s hardly any other way of getting this stuff. It has to be remembered, stored in the middle of paradoxes and to make new ones: there is a slightly melancholy passage in Hans Richter’s account of dada where he describes Hannah Hoech and her house, and I think it captures the idea of memory as both a curse and as something essential and vivid.

"She slips from one room to another, all of them crammed with objects from a world that has collapsed around her. Nothing is lost where she is. She preserves a living past…" Does this description provide us with a layer of the paradox? What is forgotten provides food for mice, the remainder is memory.

SM: What are your thoughts regarding the coming to prominence of the so-called ‘Social Software’ or ‘Web 2.0’ meme? In Behind the Blip you talk about the need for a change in the focus of HCI’s so as to “reinfuse the social, the dynamic, the networks, the political, communality” into the model of the individualised user. To some extent this might be argued to have been occurring with these web based applications where the user content configures/is the software to some extent.

MF: The kinds of things produced under the rubric of social software tend to split into two directions. The first tends to have a relatively normalised and reductive understanding of the social. The advantage of this approach is that it reduces life to a set of: links of various kinds such as ‘friends’, ‘recommendations’; statements such as ‘name’, ‘interests’, etc.; permissions levels, such as ‘friend’, ‘private’, ‘public’ and so on. Because they are so radically simplified, they are able to be taken up by a variety of contexts and users, in the way that other schematic forms such as the production line have been able to be applied to numerous manufacturing situations. At the same time, within this sector, it is clear that people are generally smarter than the software they use, hence the regular and speedy hotness and then notness of sites such as Friendster, now a flop. Sometimes, the things that make a thing work or not can be very subtle, but the more obvious reasons are those such as the clear requirement by investors in the companies that spring up to use these sites simply as investment instruments that the more interesting social elements that people might bring to the site tend quickly to become of secondary importance to making a buck.Typical of this trend is even the tendency of, not just the small start-ups, but the more initially insightful researchers in this area to be recruited fast by companies like Yahoo, and then to go somehow all kinda quiet and affirmative.

The second use of ‘social software’, which precedes this just mentioned sort is founded on the basis of refusing to take the social as something that can be normalised: it insists that it must be invented, and that in such invention there is a demand for experimentation, conflict, provocation, disturbance, love, as much as if not more than for algorithmic formalisation. Work by Simon Yuill, such as spring_alpha or by the group Mongrel, I see as being core to this kind of approach. Equally, one could see a project by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori, Face Your World, an urban design platform for Westside Amsterdam kids resulting in real changes to a real space in which the design process itself was taken up in a serious way as a social and thinking process as providing much to think about in these terms. Crucial too to this kind of social software is the formation of alliances between software structures and formalisms, the materials of software with forms of intelligence and culture that are normally locked out of mainstream ICT – in ways that are tellingly linked to racialised and class-based firewalling. Examples of work in this area can be seen by Ron Eglash, The Sarai Media Lab or in The Container, in Jamaica’s Palmers Cross.

I’m aware that this is only a partial answer, there are many interesting interplays between formalisations and more dynamic, amorphous, intuitive, or sophisticated forms of life. Setting up the grounds for teasing out and experimenting with these is core to what social software should be about.

SM: As a writer yourself, both of theory and fiction, I’m sure you’re aware of the debates that constantly revolve around notions of literacy and new media. How do you see the future of writing/literature in relation to new media? Do you think writers might need to adapt in order to adopt new media?

MF: Have humans yet come to terms with the evolution of a media as old as language? I think this question is one that finds itself re-articulated here. Writing is one of the most flexible forms of media practice, and it turns you inside out. It has the capacity for extreme abstraction and utter concreteness simultaneously, something it shares with mathematics, which perhaps surpasses it in this respect. But I think this capacity is crucial to its engagement with computational and networked digital media.

What are your thoughts about the rise of the so-called Culture Industries in the UK?

The ‘culture industries’ is a partial and particularly ironic device.Of course, it first arises in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as an astringent and resolutely negative term. The contemporary vocabulary of governance has the uncanny ability to learn from marxism or other critical vocabularies and turn them round, absolving thought from the burden of criticism, offering instead the prozac haze of affirmation.

In many spheres of life we face a rule by cost benefit analysis which in the case of the culture industries makes the categorical error of mistaking the means of existence for the reasons for living. The field of cultural studies has lead in making clear that things are never that simple but has also laid the grounds for the temporary paradigm of the culture industries – it needs to deal with this paradox. In the context of ‘new media’, in the ontology of standardisation proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, the technologization of culture means that we should be facing almost a zero-degree of conformity. But we find something else happening, something for which the outcome is not predictable and not determinable. We need a coupling of the old tools of suspicion and negativity; and those of the power of experiment and speculation; with means of thought and of getting things done that attend to the situation being made now in the many fields of culture shaped by and articulating ‘new media’.

It is useful to note that the DTI-positive sounding phrase ‘culture industry’ sounds remarkably hollow when viewed from the perspective of pirate radio, one of the areas worked with in Media Ecologies, and an important form of cultural organisation for London and elsewhere, whose infrastructure is comprehensively criminalised by the Wireless Telegraphy Act, but which yet contributes vividly and essentially to the cultural industry sector, music, and notably black musics, which the inspectors employed by the DTI are active in closing down. There is a lumpen crassness in government which beggars belief, criminalising something at the same time as it is instrumentalised. The key thing to note is that the pirates continue – largely on their own terms.

The culture industries paradigm itself will only ever be part of the story and will eventually vapourise of its own volition. It describes in governmental and managerial terms certain forms of creation, certain forms of value production in a very partial way, those that register in economic terms. It makes things so trite and reductive that most artists or others just see it indeed as just the latest variety of blagging vocabulary that they have to adopt, it may even be blag upon blag all the way up the hierarchy, but reductivism is a very powerful tool, it puts handles on things that were too messy to touch before, things that had to be understood in the fullness of their terms. The rule of cost-benefit analysis is such a handle.

At the same time, because the culture industries model is so limited, it can only ever describe a very narrow series of entities or characteristics of entities. Things may exist partly in those terms but also radically diverge from them. So there is perhaps an opportunity, to make some things sensible in certain terms, to make a figuration of culture that is something like a moiré pattern of intermeshing parts, from which something novel and useful might emerge. (A moiré pattern is formed by the superposition of repetitive layers, both in the image and in the spectral domains, those of light and colour, in which the periodic interval between parts of layers is closed or stretched. Common examples are the intersections of regular patterns at an angle to each other, such as railings or rows of trees, or meshworks of ripples in a stretch of water, overlapping gratings or fabrics). If we take the context of computational and networked digital media, some elements, at some of the time correspond to rhythms of convergence and divergence of different series. These series might correspond, amongst other things, to what we know or nominate as: the social; markets; forms of commoditisation other forms of circulation – such as piracy or mutual aid, and processes of circulation and invention that are novel or as yet unnamed.

Such a moiré pattern might mesh standard objects, which may indeed at some scale of their existence correspond to the ontology of the original theorisation of the culture industry, and temporarily layer them with constituent and transformative dimensions of culture and knowledge that render them at least partially non-objectified, and thus open to a conceivably infinite array of forces, that is to say, become deeply heterogeneous and thus crucial to culture as a living, involuted and expansive process rather than an entry on a spreadsheet.