Digging Deep—Mud as Medium. Playful Encounters with the Soil

Abstract

Computing increasingly takes place beyond the desktop, as humanity is being permanently surrounded by, and entangled with, technological infrastructure. Against the backdrop of these recent developments, echoing in the emergence of what geologist Peter K. Haff calls the “technosphere”, we are confronted with the necessity to reframe contemporary media technologies beyond the epistemic tradition of modernity. Established dichotomies such as nature/culture, subject/object and inside/outside increasingly fail to diagnose what it means to live in the current condition. Navigating through the possibilities of playful engagement in these media-saturated environments, I will argue for the notion of the “elemental” in media studies, in its first and foremost substance-based meaning, indicating an ecological understanding of technology. In negotiating these potentials, speculative artistic strategies make use of the properties of natural elements in experimental media-technological set ups. They allow for a playful attitude towards technology, e.g. by appropriating the messy characteristics of mud as an interactional device, through the attempt to establish contact with the mineral basis of technological artifacts or by applying the capacities of the soil to demonstrate alternative screen formats. In this sense, the paper serves as a proposal to re-evaluate the media phenomena of the twenty-first century in terms of a techno-ecological paradigm shift in media theory.