| Summary: | This article focuses on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab. The Eco Media project developed new modes of thinking media (ecology) through a tracking of the intensities of nature. However, in this case the medium is understood in a very broad sense to cover the ecosystem as a communication network of atmospheric flows, tides, reproductive hormones, scent markers, migrations or geological distributions. The project(s) do not focus solely on the ecological crisis that has been a topic of media representations for years, but they seem to engage with a more immanent level of media ecology in a manner that resembles Matthew Fuller’s call for ‘Art for Animals.’ Media is approached from the viewpoint of animal perceptions, motilities and energies (such as wind) that escape the frameworks of ‘human media.’ In this context the rhetorical question of the Ecomedia project concerning non-human media is intriguing: ‘Can “natural media” with its different agencies and sensorium help to rethink human media, revealing opportunities for action or areas of mutual interest?’ With the Dead Media Lab project, this article extends the discussion concerning media ecologies to media archaeology as well. Through such transversal connections, it investigates intensive transpositions not only in terms of nature/media, but also as temporal intertwinings of past, ‘dead’ media and the contemporary media sphere. Despite the focus on the old media of nature, such projects are emblematic of concerns that stem from a high-tech network culture. Ideas stemming from animal worlds and nature are increasingly used as tools to understand high tech culture, and they expand the notion of ‘medium’ to take into account non-human energies of intensive and topological kinds.
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