Emerging Environments

Emerging Environments

By Steph Holl-Trieu

Environments are elusive. Etymologically, an environment is what surrounds, encircles and encloses, inherited from the Old French environer. The Latin suffix -ment indicates that the environment-as-noun signifies the result or product of the action of the verb (environ-) — or its means or instruments. This double-edged meaning hidden in the suffix spills and slips fully into the word’s own ambiguity: Environments emerge from actions – they are results, or temporary manifestations, of actions’ endpoints. At the same time, they offer us affordances to perform new actions; actions which again transform environments, these transformed environments then affording us anew to act within them. While we are grasping for it, forming a concept, the environment is already in the process of changing.

It is not only human action that creates environments, but the constant doings and undoings in the kingdoms of animalia, fungi, plantae and bacteria. And yet, the constraint of identifying active (organic) subjects by separating them from inert (inorganic) matter is quite possibly an accelerated collapse into dead ends. Species belonging to the machinic phylum do not merely react to the form-giving actions of living beings, but hold the very properties that give form to the economic intra-actions between biology and metallurgy. In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message”. Far from being a catchy slogan, it was primarily intended as a serious warning: against the juicy meat of content (whatever you have been binge-watching) that anaesthetises while shifting our attention away from media nested in other media (television, online streaming, digitised mechanical moving images, packets of data shooting across fibre optic cables). While you’re caught in the narcotic loop of Netflix’ autoplay, media living in other media are creating their own environments forcefully and (to your distracted eye) invisibly.

The important question is not why X is saying Y in Z film (or why Tay became a spinshot of racist slurs – the answer is quite clear: humans are festering pools of bigotry), but how does seeing from a distance (tele-vision) actually matter, how does it manifest materially? Media emerge from a given environment, yet they inject difference into the scale, pace and pattern upon which the environment acts on itself and whomever or whatever it encompasses. The medium-as-message forces us to turn Artificial Intelligence on its head to inquire after the Intelligence of the Artificial, so as to keep up with the delays and sprints in pace, the undulation and distortion of patterns across micro- and macroscales. The artificial signifies and traces dead matter being forced down below: tectonic plates shifting, oil pressurised to squirt above the surface, metals mined from ores, circuits and packets switching, gases released into and taken from the atmosphere, diodes flashing, signals bouncing, minute actions constantly bleeping with the transmission and transformation of energy and information. However nauseating it might be, keeping up with the artificial is necessary: Environments remain elusive, not just because they are constantly changing, but because they force action and demand to be changed.

Integrae Naturae, Robert Fludd, 1624 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Houghton_EC_F6707_B638p_v.1_-_Robert_Fludd,_Integrae_Naturae.jpg