Working in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Researching ecocritical approaches to the history and philosophy of media and media arts history Address: Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
UK
Ecología, tecnología, sociedad: La ecocrítica como bien común., 2024
Prefacio
Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro
Datos antropoceno
Tres digresiones
L... more Prefacio Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro Datos antropoceno Tres digresiones La imagen de massa La ecocrítica como bien común transnacional Postumo
The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they don't trust the media but that they trust them too mu... more The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they don't trust the media but that they trust them too much. White supremacists are absolutely convinced by their supremacy. They distrust technologies and climate change as much as the global poor because, as white Europeans, they believe they are exempt from exploitation. This book argues that the only truths possible in the 21st century are mobile, inventive practices involving everything European models of communication exclude: technologies, nature, and leftover humanity. Tracing histories of their separation, Truth analyzes the struggle between the new dominance of information systems and the sensory worlds it excludes, not least the ancestral wisdom that the West has imprisoned in its technologies. The emergent cybernetics of the 1940s has become the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Truth opposes its division of the world between subjects and objects, signals and noise, emphasizing that there can be no return to some primal Eden of unfettered exchange. Instead, these divisions, which have fundamentally reorganized the commodity form that they inherited, are the historical conditions we must confront. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic practices, from literature, film, art, music, workplace media, scientific instruments, and animal displays, Truth seeks out ways to create a new commons and a new politics grounded in aesthetic properties of creativity, senses and perception that can no longer be restricted to humans alone.
This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by exam... more This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research.
Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.
This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image. New York: Oxford University Press. , 2020
Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminis... more Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Like them, it extends beyond judgements about texts with clear ecological themes, demonstrating the significance of ecocriticism for any advanced understanding of cultural forms. Anecdotal method is ecocritical because it focuses on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis when social ordering and ecological forces clash. The anecdote's power to produce events, meanings and history forms a methodological entry to aesthetic politics. Anecdotal Evidence provides an outline of the need for and principles of anecdotal method; a case study of eco-critical themes in Hollywood films shaped by the Global Financial Crisis; and a confrontation with mass image databases of social and streaming media that due to their scale and organisation appear at first immune to anecdotal method. Only because the environment has a history is it possible to intervene environmentally. Because we continually misrecognise the historical production of environments, the first task of ecocritique is to bring our formative concept of ecology into crisis. Its final task will be to achieve the good life for everything connected by the historical implication of humans in ecology, and ecology in humans. No politics can be undertaken in our times except through media: ecocritical media studies and environmental humanities have a key role in rethinking ecopolitics in the 21st century.
While digital media gives us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.
Drawing on four years of online discussion and four face-to-face conferences hosted by the ADA Ne... more Drawing on four years of online discussion and four face-to-face conferences hosted by the ADA Network, The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader presents key texts on new media art to a broad audience. Co-edited by Su Ballard and Stella Brennan, and with contributions by major artists and writers from New Zealand and further afield, the Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader remains a critical text documenting digital and media arts in New Zealand. It was published by Clouds Publishing, Auckland in 2008.
Digital Light will be an important book. It marks a moment in history at which we are comin... more Digital Light will be an important book. It marks a moment in history at which we are coming to terms with a range of technological convergences that have profoundly shifted the status of image production and consumption. It maps the ways in which technologies employing light have evolved from their earliest manifestations into the somewhat multifarious, operational and highly distributed conditions of today. It collects a number of very significant, accomplished practitioners and thinkers, many of whom actively look back (historically) at how ways of working with light have altered, evolved and become tangled in other agendas, implications and dimensions. The rapid shifts in the status and role of photography – first in the move to digital photography and then to their embedded smart phone ubiquity and life on photo-sharing websites and social media, is a repeated theme that returns across many of the essays. Digital Light also deals with the way in which this shift (and others) give the image the status of data, the forms of embedded agency this entails, and the implicit interaction/intersection with dimensions beyond the ‘image’ per se, through ‘tagging’ of various sorts, algorithmic construction, and automated functions.
Light is the condition of all vision, and the visual media are our most important explorations of... more Light is the condition of all vision, and the visual media are our most important explorations of this condition. The history of visual technologies reveals a centuries-long project aimed at controlling light. In this book, Sean Cubitt traces a genealogy of the dominant visual media of the twenty-first century—digital video, film, and photography—through a history of materials and practices that begins with the inventions of intaglio printing and oil painting. Attending to the specificities of inks and pigments, cathode ray tubes, color film, lenses, screens, and chips, Cubitt argues that we have moved from a hierarchical visual culture focused on semantic values to a more democratic but value-free numerical commodity.
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt’s attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.
An eco-thriller available now for Kindle: Revolution Earth, the novel co-authored by Sean Cubitt ... more An eco-thriller available now for Kindle: Revolution Earth, the novel co-authored by Sean Cubitt and Alison Ripley Cubitt, is available through Amazon stores worldwide as e-book and print-on-demand, for example from the UK store
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Earth-Lambert-Nagle-ebook/dp/B008AK7AV4
Pre-proofs of the book published in 2005.
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoM... more Pre-proofs of the book published in 2005.
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoMedia an enormously important book. A rare combination of ecological and pro-technological thought, his theory of mediation -- of techne as a beneficial communicative device -- suggests that, rather than treat technology as the enemy, we should embrace it as a powerful ally. His case-studies reveal that seeing technology as a positive force could be the key to a non-aggressive form of ecopolitics: that rereading media technologies as communicative devices could help re-establish a physis-polis relationship in areas beyond film."
Holly Rogers, reviewing Ecomedia in Scope
Ecología, tecnología, sociedad: La ecocrítica como bien común., 2024
Prefacio
Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro
Datos antropoceno
Tres digresiones
L... more Prefacio Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro Datos antropoceno Tres digresiones La imagen de massa La ecocrítica como bien común transnacional Postumo
The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they don't trust the media but that they trust them too mu... more The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they don't trust the media but that they trust them too much. White supremacists are absolutely convinced by their supremacy. They distrust technologies and climate change as much as the global poor because, as white Europeans, they believe they are exempt from exploitation. This book argues that the only truths possible in the 21st century are mobile, inventive practices involving everything European models of communication exclude: technologies, nature, and leftover humanity. Tracing histories of their separation, Truth analyzes the struggle between the new dominance of information systems and the sensory worlds it excludes, not least the ancestral wisdom that the West has imprisoned in its technologies. The emergent cybernetics of the 1940s has become the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Truth opposes its division of the world between subjects and objects, signals and noise, emphasizing that there can be no return to some primal Eden of unfettered exchange. Instead, these divisions, which have fundamentally reorganized the commodity form that they inherited, are the historical conditions we must confront. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic practices, from literature, film, art, music, workplace media, scientific instruments, and animal displays, Truth seeks out ways to create a new commons and a new politics grounded in aesthetic properties of creativity, senses and perception that can no longer be restricted to humans alone.
This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by exam... more This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research.
Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.
This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image. New York: Oxford University Press. , 2020
Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminis... more Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Like them, it extends beyond judgements about texts with clear ecological themes, demonstrating the significance of ecocriticism for any advanced understanding of cultural forms. Anecdotal method is ecocritical because it focuses on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis when social ordering and ecological forces clash. The anecdote's power to produce events, meanings and history forms a methodological entry to aesthetic politics. Anecdotal Evidence provides an outline of the need for and principles of anecdotal method; a case study of eco-critical themes in Hollywood films shaped by the Global Financial Crisis; and a confrontation with mass image databases of social and streaming media that due to their scale and organisation appear at first immune to anecdotal method. Only because the environment has a history is it possible to intervene environmentally. Because we continually misrecognise the historical production of environments, the first task of ecocritique is to bring our formative concept of ecology into crisis. Its final task will be to achieve the good life for everything connected by the historical implication of humans in ecology, and ecology in humans. No politics can be undertaken in our times except through media: ecocritical media studies and environmental humanities have a key role in rethinking ecopolitics in the 21st century.
While digital media gives us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.
Drawing on four years of online discussion and four face-to-face conferences hosted by the ADA Ne... more Drawing on four years of online discussion and four face-to-face conferences hosted by the ADA Network, The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader presents key texts on new media art to a broad audience. Co-edited by Su Ballard and Stella Brennan, and with contributions by major artists and writers from New Zealand and further afield, the Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader remains a critical text documenting digital and media arts in New Zealand. It was published by Clouds Publishing, Auckland in 2008.
Digital Light will be an important book. It marks a moment in history at which we are comin... more Digital Light will be an important book. It marks a moment in history at which we are coming to terms with a range of technological convergences that have profoundly shifted the status of image production and consumption. It maps the ways in which technologies employing light have evolved from their earliest manifestations into the somewhat multifarious, operational and highly distributed conditions of today. It collects a number of very significant, accomplished practitioners and thinkers, many of whom actively look back (historically) at how ways of working with light have altered, evolved and become tangled in other agendas, implications and dimensions. The rapid shifts in the status and role of photography – first in the move to digital photography and then to their embedded smart phone ubiquity and life on photo-sharing websites and social media, is a repeated theme that returns across many of the essays. Digital Light also deals with the way in which this shift (and others) give the image the status of data, the forms of embedded agency this entails, and the implicit interaction/intersection with dimensions beyond the ‘image’ per se, through ‘tagging’ of various sorts, algorithmic construction, and automated functions.
Light is the condition of all vision, and the visual media are our most important explorations of... more Light is the condition of all vision, and the visual media are our most important explorations of this condition. The history of visual technologies reveals a centuries-long project aimed at controlling light. In this book, Sean Cubitt traces a genealogy of the dominant visual media of the twenty-first century—digital video, film, and photography—through a history of materials and practices that begins with the inventions of intaglio printing and oil painting. Attending to the specificities of inks and pigments, cathode ray tubes, color film, lenses, screens, and chips, Cubitt argues that we have moved from a hierarchical visual culture focused on semantic values to a more democratic but value-free numerical commodity.
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt’s attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.
An eco-thriller available now for Kindle: Revolution Earth, the novel co-authored by Sean Cubitt ... more An eco-thriller available now for Kindle: Revolution Earth, the novel co-authored by Sean Cubitt and Alison Ripley Cubitt, is available through Amazon stores worldwide as e-book and print-on-demand, for example from the UK store
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Earth-Lambert-Nagle-ebook/dp/B008AK7AV4
Pre-proofs of the book published in 2005.
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoM... more Pre-proofs of the book published in 2005.
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoMedia an enormously important book. A rare combination of ecological and pro-technological thought, his theory of mediation -- of techne as a beneficial communicative device -- suggests that, rather than treat technology as the enemy, we should embrace it as a powerful ally. His case-studies reveal that seeing technology as a positive force could be the key to a non-aggressive form of ecopolitics: that rereading media technologies as communicative devices could help re-establish a physis-polis relationship in areas beyond film."
Holly Rogers, reviewing Ecomedia in Scope
Notes from the very beginning of the third book in the aesthetic politics trilogy, Beauty. Inchoa... more Notes from the very beginning of the third book in the aesthetic politics trilogy, Beauty. Inchoate ideas about star gazing, looking for leads on writings about the experience of star gazing, and possibly msic (not, not yet anyway, depictions, histories, visualisations and other mediations: the experience, witnessing how it feels is what I'm trying to thnk about and through). Any advice gratefully received
In a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evan... more In a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evans offered principles for his practice. Close analysis suggests that the heart of his concerns lie in the photographers’ love for their subjects based in an unexpressed but significant ecological orientation. This analysis leads towards a critical reconsideration of the concept of ‘mass image’, a term developed to describe the production and management of a collective database of imagery uploaded to social media platforms. The article criticises the idea that this mass image is single and unified. Developing ideas of love and fantasy, the article argues that, in an era when the unconscious is structured not like language but like code, massed image databases lack a single present time, with consequences for photographic aesthetics.
"We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of t... more "We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's informatio explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neurosciences to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis. The goal is to expand visual competence in investigating new visual worlds and to build cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.
About the Author"
OPEN ACCESS Link below
From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened... more OPEN ACCESS Link below
From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened. The failure of the COP conferences places everyone face to face with just such a terminal event – very possibly the same event that has never ceased since 1492. The challenge is to survive, and to make media and culture, after the end
Chapter from Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (eds), The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and P... more Chapter from Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (eds), The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and Practice, Routledge/American Film Institute, 2012: 277-296.
Narrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book fro... more Narrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book from BFI publishing that not only contributes to, but in many ways maps, that criss-crossed field prosaically indicated by its name. The book features a terrific range of writing ...
“Media arts” is a phrase that has circulated for a century now, dealing with electromechanical me... more “Media arts” is a phrase that has circulated for a century now, dealing with electromechanical media (radio, film, rotary press, photography) and more recently with electronic media (video, electronic music, digital arts). With benefit of hindsight it became doctrine that all forms of art were media (Greenberg’s and McLuhan’s different historical versions of medium specificity); that all media were digital (Kittler) and – in what may well be the hegemonic idea of the 21st century – that all human activity, even all ecological activity, has always been fundamentally communicative; that we have been able to conceive of an aesthetic without medium. No matter that the substitute – the concept, especially in anti-retinal art – is in many respects a discrete medium embedded in the entrails of late 20th century theories of language. This article first proposes this diagnosis, then sets out to decipher why the contradictions of art and technology, and more broadly of science and the social, have brought us to this conjuncture, and what kind of opportunity it presents for the (re)making of both arts and media.
VCS Visual Cultural Studies 3-4 “Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media, 2022
Where does the medium in contemporary art begin and end? How can a work that uses technologies be... more Where does the medium in contemporary art begin and end? How can a work that uses technologies be distinguished from one that does not? What cases can be linked to the specific field of art and technology and which cannot? The answers to these questions are not the ones commonly imagined and widely bandied about – the common belief that there is no longer any sense in referring to art and technology. We believe that the point of the question is precisely the opposite: today it is necessary, more than ever, to gain a clear understanding of what is meant by art and technology precisely because the boundary between technologies and life have dissolved. Studying the work of artists who operate in this field enables us to acquire vital tools for interpreting our hyper-technological society and grasp the explosive potential of their lateral thinking, including the field of technological and scientific research.
Supply chains connect materials with manufacture and assembly, with consumers and ultimately with... more Supply chains connect materials with manufacture and assembly, with consumers and ultimately with disposal. Materials, manufacture and governance of goods and services are further complicated by the circuits of materials, energy and waste that cycle through them. This chapter focuses on the logistical infrastructure of cinema production and distribution, taking examples from device fabrication, globally distributed film production, containerised and streaming distribution, and the imbrication of cinema with financialisation. The failure of COP26 and, it is argued, of capital as a whole to deal with its destructive tendency forces ecocriticism to look more closely at the global trade in media devices, infrastructures, labour and content. Economic policies as much as creativity drive the “global studio” that is now the networked source and destination of film production. Thus far, ecology and economics have been deadly enemies. Can cinema provide a way to overcome their mutual suicide pact?
Narrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book fro... more Narrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book from BFI publishing that not only contributes to, but in many ways maps, that criss-crossed field prosaically indicated by its name. The book features a terrific range of writing ...
Iron Man 2 (John Favreau, 2010) focuses on a man isolated from his environment by a protective su... more Iron Man 2 (John Favreau, 2010) focuses on a man isolated from his environment by a protective suit, and from his friends, family, and romantic interest by the conviction that he is dying as a result of the suit itself. While Tony Stark performs the role of billionaire playboy, Iron Man perceives the world in a doubled form, as perspectival image and as data diagrams in his heads-up display. The chapter gives a brief history of data visualisation, the most important visual language since perspective and now more dominant, to seek out the difficulty of being human in isolation, and at a moment when regimes for understanding the world are in flux. The chapter includes a discussion of the fictional inventor as a paragon of a mythical form of labour, and traces his construction to a new version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, engaging Stark in competition with his AI.
Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) is the story of a clone haunted by memories of a previous existe... more Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) is the story of a clone haunted by memories of a previous existence. In the opening sequence, this ambivalent existence is echoed in the mix of digital and physical effects. Discussion of this ambivalence leads into an analysis of nonidentity versus identity, especially in a critical sequence in which clone Jack watches and is observed by a fish. Themes of individualism raised in the chapter on Iron Man return here in more complex form as Jack oscillates among individuality, fidelity to a model, and species-being. This is the third film in a row which raises issues of debt and obligation through the trope of a character who is dead, dying, or reborn, a theme of posthumous existence in this case posed as the only alternative to an absent community.
Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that pi... more Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.
In Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of &q... more In Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of "new media" and at the same time write the histories of these arts? These scholars and practitioners redefine the nature of the field, focusing on the materials of history -- the materials through which the past is mediated. Drawing on the tools of media archaeology and the history and philosophy of media, they propose a new materialist media art history. The contributors consider the idea of history and the artwork's moment in time; the intersection of geography and history in regional practice, illustrated by examples from eastern Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; the contradictory scales of evolution, life cycles, and bodily rhythms in bio art; and the history of the future -- how the future has been imagined, planned for, and established as a vector throughout the history of new media arts. These essays, written from widely diverse critical perspectives, capture a dynam...
A journal needs a project: to survive, to thrive, to matter. Open Access (OA) journals need a pro... more A journal needs a project: to survive, to thrive, to matter. Open Access (OA) journals need a project more than any other. OA has yet to develop a business model that will pay for the toil of editors, copy-editors, designers and content managers. Freelance authors have to prefer paying gigs; and academic authors, whose wages pay for the time to write, are under pressure to publish in recognised (established, usually hardcopy) journals with commercial publishers whose subscriptions revenue pays for the labour of publishing. The only possible reason to support an OA journal, apart from a generic desire to support OA as a principle, is that the journal has a project. Perhaps most of all, a journal needs readers. They don't need to be many. Art & Language must have had one of the smaller circulations, but to those in its ambit, it mattered. It broke new ground. We can probably all recall journals whose every issue we seized on hungrily, steering us and our buddies into new paradigms. Some journals had the grace to stop when the work was done. Others turned respectable in middle age. Some began as online communities finding the need for longer, more thought-through pieces. Some have returned to faster, shorter formats. OA online has the great virtue of speed. But it still needs a reason to exist. So how does Media Theory matter? Three challenges: media, theory, and media-theory. Media, intrinsically plural as object, lie at the centre of an intrinsically interdisciplinary corpus of studies, from social sciences to humanities, professional to creative practice. Coming late to the university, major tracts of media (languages and literature, music, art, photography, architecture, and I would add economics and pretty much every field of the human sciences) had already been colonised, and
Slides for the talk to act as illustrations to the published version in Ubiquity: The Journal of ... more Slides for the talk to act as illustrations to the published version in Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive media, 5(1).
Software studies have opened the door for a new materialist analysis. This paper attempts a g... more Software studies have opened the door for a new materialist analysis. This paper attempts a genealogy of a crucial piece of hardware: the raster grid common to almost all screens in use in the 21st century. The paper will discuss both screen geometries and the standardisation of colour in terms of technological design and and international policy bodies. It proposes that material, structural and protocological conditions governing the engineering of such screens have evolved in parallel with both changing commodity relations and the development of new forms of governmentality.
Supply chains connect materials with manufacture, assembly and consumers. They also are integral ... more Supply chains connect materials with manufacture, assembly and consumers. They also are integral to contemporary film production. This paper focuses on the logistical infrastructure of cinema production using the case of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2019), a Netflix production in which locations in New Zealand filled in for Montana. In particular, the mountainous surroundings of the Ida Valley in Central Otago feature in landscape sequences. The region was an important source of gold in the period when the film is set, gold which is a crucial component of devices and distribution media central to Netflix’s streaming media model. Globally-distributed film production, international streaming distribution and the imbrication of cinema with financialisation raise questions concerning the haunting of cinematic landscape by historical colonisation and extraction. Ecological histories as much as economic policies and creativity drive the networked ‘global studio’. Thus far, ecology and economics have been deadly enemies. Can film aesthetics provide a way to overcome their mutual suicide pact?
NeON: Re@ct! Social Change Art Technology Symposium, Dundee, November, 2019
Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically... more Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically and aesthetically. But it also recognises that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are endless opportunities for misunderstanding when we capture, store and process what we confront as Nature. Contemporary economic and political conditions driving ever more terrifying inequalities of wealth and power create the crisis implicit in ecocritique. The critical functions of art, which in these circumstances implies technical and creative aesthetic and political practice, concerns the construction of a "we" that embraces the human and non-human victims of ecocide. The master's tools might dismantle the master's house, but can they build a different dwelling? Where are the practices that can produce more-than-human social change?
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Books by Sean Cubitt
Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro
Datos antropoceno
Tres digresiones
La imagen de massa
La ecocrítica como bien común transnacional
Postumo
Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.
This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/finite-media
While digital media gives us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.
Pia Ednie-Brown, RMIT, Melbourne
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt’s attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Earth-Lambert-Nagle-ebook/dp/B008AK7AV4
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoMedia an enormously important book. A rare combination of ecological and pro-technological thought, his theory of mediation -- of techne as a beneficial communicative device -- suggests that, rather than treat technology as the enemy, we should embrace it as a powerful ally. His case-studies reveal that seeing technology as a positive force could be the key to a non-aggressive form of ecopolitics: that rereading media technologies as communicative devices could help re-establish a physis-polis relationship in areas beyond film."
Holly Rogers, reviewing Ecomedia in Scope
Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro
Datos antropoceno
Tres digresiones
La imagen de massa
La ecocrítica como bien común transnacional
Postumo
Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.
This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/finite-media
While digital media gives us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.
Pia Ednie-Brown, RMIT, Melbourne
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt’s attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Earth-Lambert-Nagle-ebook/dp/B008AK7AV4
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoMedia an enormously important book. A rare combination of ecological and pro-technological thought, his theory of mediation -- of techne as a beneficial communicative device -- suggests that, rather than treat technology as the enemy, we should embrace it as a powerful ally. His case-studies reveal that seeing technology as a positive force could be the key to a non-aggressive form of ecopolitics: that rereading media technologies as communicative devices could help re-establish a physis-polis relationship in areas beyond film."
Holly Rogers, reviewing Ecomedia in Scope
About the Author"
From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened. The failure of the COP conferences places everyone face to face with just such a terminal event – very possibly the same event that has never ceased since 1492. The challenge is to survive, and to make media and culture, after the end
https://socialtextjournal.org/yes-no-referenda-and-mandates/
By Seán Cubitt, Cristóbal Escobar Duenas and Ben Gook November 14, 2023
The answers to these questions are not the ones commonly imagined and widely bandied about – the common belief that there is no longer any sense in referring to art and technology. We believe that the point of the question is precisely the opposite: today it is necessary, more than ever, to gain a clear understanding of what is meant by art and technology precisely because the boundary between technologies and life have dissolved. Studying the work of artists who operate in this field enables us to acquire vital tools for interpreting our hyper-technological society and grasp the explosive potential of their lateral thinking, including the field of technological and scientific research.