CS 400W

Ambient Media and Control

We increasingly live in environments in which, borrowing from Theodor Adorno, the noncommunicable is communicated in both unobtrusive and yet ubiquitous ways. In 1917, Erik Satie composed five short pieces collected together as ‘musique d'ameublement’ or furnishing music. For Satie, the introduction of radio afforded people the opportunity to go about their daily activities in spaces increasingly being filled with ‘unheeded’ music. As Darius Milhuad later explained, it is music that is ‘heard, but not listened to.’ Building on this, in 1978, Brian Eno characterized the musical genre he labelled, ambient, as being ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’. In both cases, we are talking about a form of mediation that is present in the background but still has the potential to affect us. On the surface, ambient media would seem then to be a matter of the exercise of control over one’s environment. Such a perspective though overlooks how they are implicated in new forms of social control, operating through environmental modulation rather than direct domination of the individual. In this seminar we will be examining the ways in which ambient media are productive of atmospheres increasingly implicated both in forms of self-care but also in affective forms of control.