Talk:The Fabulous Loop de Loop

TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF MEDIA

Gregory Bateson's text Awake appeared in the fifth issue of Radical Software. It clearly annotated the errors in epistemology that threatened the future of Spaceship Earth in the second half of the twentieth century.

“[T]he ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form [are] from the Industrial Revolution.

a) It's us against the environment.
b) It's us against other men.
c) It's the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.
d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.
e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."
f) Economic determinism is common sense.
g) Technology will do it for us.

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievement of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself...”

In 1970 there was nothing unusual about an ecological polemic appearing in a magazine devoted to the uses and maintenance of video systems. There was already an abiding connection between the notion of an ecological system regulated by feedback and a technological system regulated by the same principle. And the parallel notions of "ecology" were not simply analogous, they are systematically and structurally bound together. Steps in a broader ecology of mind.

The attraction of the Portapak was that it produced a circuitry of relations, and provided a new context in which the individual and her-his relation to the collective could be examined, re-examined and performed. The revolution proposed in the pages of Radical Software described a shift from a spectacular form of media to a performative form, in which the self and the community would evolve together in a networked media ecology.

In the next chapter I will investigate the multifarious strands that brought this media culture into existences.I will discuss the antecedent of Radical Software, the counterculture magazine The Whole Earth Catalog, which was founded by Stewart Brand. This publication appeared within a context in which cybernetic ideas had begun to permeate into the broader culture, and Stewart Brand was their ambassador within the counterculture of the 1960s. We will see how in the 1950s and 1960s aesthetics and ecology are increasingly read through a cybernetic lens, and discover that Gregory Bateson's notion of an ecology of mind is central to both.