Reckoning with Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing

The transformation of the cultural technique of calculation into a computational environment for the whole planet Earth requires media studies to undergo fundamental changes that go beyond mere reflection on the transformation of global political and economic structures. The becoming environmental of computing confronts us with the fact that the map is the territory: map and territory, media and nature, the Symbolic and the Real, are not distinguished in any categorical way but rather temporarily stabilized results of recursive processes by which they differentiate themselves from each other and call each other into being.

However, the cultural technique of calculation has not only become “environmental” since the ubiquity of computation turned cultural techniques into environing techniques. Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything,” with the materialities of the media that define the environmental conditions of computability, as well as with practices of extracting, storing and transferring data. This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.