Paper short abstract:

The concept of ‘anthropomediality’ traces a new path for the anthropological study of media, moving towards the post-human. Matter is here central, signing the incarnated relations between humans and technologies. This paper suggests an excavation on materiality by following an ecological approach.

Paper long abstract:

The attempt to fill the illusory gap that traditionally distance human-animals and technical objects on an epistemic level has recently lead Othold and Voss (2015) to conceptualise 'anthropomediality'. In such a perspective, media technologies are reconceived from being mere extensions of the human to elementary components co-constituting her/his becoming - aligning with a post-human framework that is increasingly central in media and cultural studies (Braidotti; Hayles). Once humanist dichotomies, ontological hierarchies and the false metaphysics of representation are left behind, a vital perception of co-emergence surfaces, where media technologies incarnate via a slow sedimentation on anthropotechnic strata. Superficial strata are the point of departure for an excavation of materiality as a key aspect of processes of anthropomediation.

The objective of this paper is to put forward an ecological approach that will be capable of following the drill of a hypogeum media anthropological investigation. To concern with the complexity onto which anthropomediality operates, we suggest it is necessary to consider the media-human assemblage as being an integral part of the environment where he/she is situated and that 'enactively' contributes to determinate (Varela, Thompson and Rosch). To fully grasp the onto-epistemological 'hybridations' (Marchesini) innovatively continued by digital media technologies, we propose to depart from, and go back to, the incarnated and relational materiality that characterises anthropomediality. As such, an ecological approach is not a mere application of representations (metaphors): ecological are the relation in which both, anthropomediation, and the study of its ethical and political implications, are inescapably entangled through transformations (metamorphoses).