PSYCHOLOGICALLY ULTIMATE BACKGROUND:
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS OF AMBIENT MEDIA

Psychologically Ultimate Background: the Environmental Politics of Ambient Media revisits the political problem and possibilities of ambient media as a tool for understanding and disrupting the problem of ambient violences like everyday chemical toxicity: modes of harm not always ruled by the structure of an event. The project presents an alternative genealogy of ambient media — long theorized as neoliberal self-soothing (at best) or outright control tactic (at worst) — as a mode that promotes attunement to environment above attention to emplotment: an affordance with a striking urgency in the face of forms of violence too slow or uncertain to metabolize in narrative. Through examinations of the diverse history of ambient media production, environmental adaptations — transmutations of narrative to ambient media, and back again, ambient documentary, the emergent mid-2010’s YouTube microgenre of Mallwave, and the “background listening” communities that have developed around ambient modes, Psychologically Ultimate Background makes a case for the potential of ambient media as a potentially liberatory praxis and pedagogy of surround.