https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2023.2271289

For Michael Nitsche, media design is about balance. With the world in a pivotal moment in the fight to stabilize climate change, media designers must consider a “vital break” out of complacency, reconsidering material needs by conscientiously working in tandem with complex networks comprising humans and nonhumans. Nitsche’s monograph proposes the critical need to consider interdependent networks and relationships in media design. By looking to pre-digital examples of hands-on craft production, the individual or shared experience of performance and the pervasiveness of digital media, Nitsche analyzes material conversations in the Anthropocene. His book models how to produce dialogue and reflection regarding necessary material adjustments across media design disciplines, not solutions.

The book comprises five chapters interlacing theory with artifact examples in four primary-making disciplines: media, design, performance, and craft. Nitsche begins by proposing a balanced yet imperative rethinking toward “material stuff and media practices” (2), hence the term vital media. Vital media is perhaps the consummate paradigm—an ongoing debate and conversation about creative expression, media production, and resulting physical changes on Earth. Each chapter begins with a case study to foreground themes of material culture including resource frameworks such as technological systems or concrete objects. Case studies range from public projects to individual artist practice and cross multiple modes of making: handcraft, digital, and hybrid. The overarching theme is not only material balance but also the relationship of all participants—human and nonhuman—within media design.

Earthrise—the infamous image of Earth snapped by the Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966—introduces chapter 2, “Mapping Vital Media.” Nitsche uses the image to introduce a material web of intertwined networks comprised of people, objects, media production, and requisite material agency. Considered a watershed moment in the space race, the photograph’s making depended upon a complex technological network of media that included cameras with spy-quality lenses, film scanners, image transmission, and computers on Earth to receive the image. It marks the beginning of space junk and shows how underlying material culture for such human feats brings negative consequences for the Earth and the moon. While the production of the famed photo is the result of embroiled media production, it is very clearly the result of human will. To manage the web of activity to produce such an image, vital media must consider material agency, human cognitive capacity, the concrete object, and the human desire for evolution and growth.  

 “Performance Makers” contemplates how vital media supports creative expression through performance. The chapter examines the unstable condition of creative performance and the relational interdependencies of the performers. Among the examples is Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks, a 1982 urban reforestation art performance involving planting 7000 trees and placing basalt stones in Kassel, Germany. Twenty-five years later, artists Eva and Franco Mattes reenact Beuys’ social sculpture through the video game Second Life, which allows users to create avatars and move through a virtual reality where experience is fantastical and prescribed insofar as actions equal specific outcomes. The materials rely on a complex digital infrastructure, including electricity, server farms, and personal computers. In Mattes’ reenactment, the materials are digital objects, and the shared yet detached experience is with other avatars, a distinct difference between Beuys’ environmentally driven installation piece. Furthermore, while the 7000 Oaks installation positively contributes to urban reforestation, the Mattes’ digital homage consumes energy without a counterbalance. It’s also fleeting. Trees are enduring, while digital experiences—though they add to social experience and support creativity—lack permanence. The chapter continues by contemplating the digital performances and material networks of Blendie, a voice-controlled blender by Kelly Dobson, Tweenbots, a social robot by Kacie Kinzer, and Trixie la Brique, a construction brick puppet in The Brick Bros. Circus puppetry show. Throughout each example, media production is continually in flux and unstable. It requires assessment, adjustment, and critical dialogue among cognizant and non-cognizant collaborators.

In “Recentering,” Nitsche turns to craft theorists Peter Dormer, Glenn Adamson, and Edward Lucie Smith to define craft as a set of “co-creative material practices that are based on needs” (110). Nietsche expands our understanding of ‘needs’ to include the needs of materials as equal to human needs. Together, he says, they are realized through a “shared becoming”(110) with three steps: 1. Encounter—adjustments to materials; 2. Exploration—discovery and improvisation; and 3. Collaboration—shared production in pursuit of the new. By way of example, Niesche turns to the craft of potter and Iraq War Veteran Ehren Tool. Through his pottery practice, Tool makes roughly crafted cups infused with war images: dying soldiers, weapons, and slogans that create a vibrant discourse on the horrors of war. The cups, which serve a human need for making, cathartic processing of war, and shared narrative and creation of an object, open up critical discourse and conversation for the artist, though they offer no resolution. The last examples speak to material craft experimentation, wherein combining digital technology and physical making yields hybridized artifacts such as Hannah Perner-Wilson’s electronic textiles and Amit Zoran’s refabricated bowls, a combination of 3D printing and existing vessels. In these examples, vital media facilitates conversation and material experimentation.

In “Digital Folk,” Nitsche turns to craft material practice and technology ascertained through folklife’s broader social and anthropological experiences. Nitsche outlines three salient folklife criteria: “lived material culture, variation within tradition, and community-based practices” (201). Nitsche touches on craftivism—a term coined by Betsy Greer to describe the amalgamation of material craft practice and activism—which elevates traditional crafts such as knitting, quilting, or cross-stitching to that of powerful activism artifacts disseminated to global craft communities via social media. For example, Cat Mazza’s Nike Blanket Petition (2003-2008), a hybrid assemblage including an online petition and an oversized collaborative crocheted blanket emblazoned with a massive swoosh symbol, critiques Nike’s labor exploitation and consumption culture. Rather than individual practice, folklife builds on communal arcs where people and materials thrive through a balanced vital media practice. It begs the contemplation of media ecology and reclaiming maker practices as they are realized in the age of digital media.

Ultimately, Nitshe argues that vital media—progenies of the human condition—must not be human-centric. Instead, responsible engagement requires balanced consideration of all media partners: material, biological, social, and human. The book does not provide a neat resolution or production model for balancing media production, and environmental change is not the primary focus; instead, it calls for consideration of materials and networks and critical reflection in support of the human need for creative expression. Vital media lays the groundwork for sustainable media practice and the necessary behavioral change to support our world. Creative expression in media requires thoughtful contemplation of all performers and participants, a continual assessment of actions and consequences. Drawing uponexamples from traditional handcraft and interactive experiences, Vital Media is both demonstrative and theoretical.