Matter Transmission: Mediation in a Paleocyber Age

Description

Arguing for a paleocybernetic approach to current media studies debates, Nicolas Salazar Sutil develops an original framework for a new media ecology that embraces the primitive, the prehistoric, and the brute. Paying serious attention to materials used for cultural mediation that are unprocessed, unexplained, and raw such as bones and limestones, Salazar Sutil posits that advanced industrialisation of new media technology has prompted countercultural movements that call for radical new ways of transmitting culture, for instance through an experiential and high-tech appreciation of prehistoric landscape heritage. The future calls for a Palaeolithic awareness of living landscape as medium for the embodied transmission of cultural imaginaries and memories. The more media technology spurs mass forms of instantaneous media communication, the greater the need for primitive knowledge of earthling body and earthly landscape, our prime media for sustainable cultural transmission.

Nicolas Salazar Sutil is Academic Fellow in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, UK. A cultural theorist and digital arts practitioner, he is the author of Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement (MIT Press 2015) and Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and Performance (co-edited with Sita Popat).

This is a highly innovative and original project, much welcomed in the field of 'media-materialism'. Salazar Sutil's coverage of the subject is more than adequate and completely to the point. * Bernd Herzogenrath, Professor of American Studies, University of Frankfurt, Germany. * A brilliantly narrated and documented descent into the prehistory of the imagination; an archaeology of mediation that loops Lascaux into space travel; a sensory riposte to a cultural studies industry that has forgotten its origins in brute material and buried the kinaesthetic subject out of sight of nature. Salazar Sutil's 'paleocyber way of life' is a powerfully argued call to reject our era's prevailing narcissism, and, reconnecting to humanity's childhood, to start growing up. * Paul Carter, Professor of Design - Urbanism, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia *