Ecomedia Studies

This book features ten critical essays on ecodocumentaries written by eminent scholars from India, USA, Ireland, Finland and Turkey in the area of ecocinema studies. Situating social documentaries with explicit ecological form and content, the volume takes relational positions on political, cultural and conservational aspects of natures and cultures in various cultural contexts. Documentaries themed around issues such as electronic waste, animal rights, land ethics, pollution of river, land grabbing, development and exotic plants are some of the topics ecocritiqued in this volume.

Mother earth tied to the train tracks: The scriptive implications of melodrama in climate change discourse abSTracT This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) as paradigmatic. It engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse and expands on that scholarship by introducing a performance studies methodology to examine how melodrama offers the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The essay examines the tropes of melodrama – which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action – in order to analyse their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change. This essay engages in close readings of performances struc-tured by generic scriptive discourse to argue that, for climate change activists, the forms that environmental narratives take, may communicate as much as the content of those narratives.

As severe drought conditions continue to persist in the western United States, it has become increasingly clear that large-scale water development infrastructures are partially to blame. While groundwater pumping has been blamed for unprecedented levels of terrestrial subsidence, large dams, reservoirs, and diversion canals have had marked effects on regional hydrological processes and water availability. Mainstream environmentalist and anti-dam rhetoric often focuses on the politics, economics, and ecosystemic impacts of the crisis, as in historical accounts like Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert; documentaries like Patagonia's DamNation and Cody Sheehy's Beyond the Mirage; and the photographs of Edward Burtynksy, Peter Goin, and others. However, there is far less discussion surrounding the ways in which human-induced water crises have been impacting indigenous communities in the western United States since the so-called “Reclamation Era” between the 1930s and the 1970s, when thousands of large dams were built throughout the western US. As historian Jane Griffith argues, large dam construction reflected the process of "dam/ning," wherein water development efforts were infused with the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism and "tactics to preserve White settler memory, history and claims to land and water.”  In this essay, I examine the ways in which contemporary anti-dam and water-focused ecomedia in the western United States continues the process of "dam/ning" by largely excluding indigenous voices and failing to adequately account for indigenous experiences. Using examples of photography, museum exhibits, film, and social media campaigns, I highlight the ways in which indigenous artists are re-historicizing water development, drought, and indigenous displacement as the dystopic results of settler colonialism and seeking to re-orient contemporary drought discourse in ways that account for long-standing indigenous water rights struggles.

This article studies several shots of large-scale natural disasters (flood, typhoon, volcanic eruption, and so on) that punctuate Dragonfly Eyes (2017), Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first foray into cinematic production which stitched and edited more than 10000 hours of video footage recorded by surveillance cameras across China and uploaded to cloud storage online. Through the lens of found footage aesthetics and the concept of ecological sublime in recent scholarship--on both the sublimity of nature and the viewing condition of this sublimity afforded by modern technologies—I address the following questions: How do these shots speak to the video’s overall storyline? What do they tell us about the avant-garde practice of found footage film? More crucially, what ecological significance does the video’s peculiar natural aesthetics carry? Paying heed to these aspects of the video, I suggest, helps us open up larger inquiries concerning the search for a suitable means of representing our ecological condition today.

In today's society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of  everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine. https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9783957961488-Machine.pdf

Roland Emmerich's disaster blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow appeals to both rational thinking and emotions as it tells its tale of abrupt and catastrophic climate change, turning current perceptions of risk—anticipated catastrophes, as Ulrich Beck calls them—into audio-visual spectacles that have a direct visceral effect on the viewer. The essay draws connections between five independently conducted audience response studies in the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan on the one hand, and cognitive approaches to film studies on the other, in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how, exactly, The Day After Tomorrow interacts with its viewers’ emotions, perceptions, and cognitions. Emmerich’s film engages its viewers emotionally in both its melodramatic plotline and the mind-boggling spectacle of “natural” disaster. The basic information about climate change it communicates between the lines is thus infused with affect and likely to make an impact on viewers’ perception and cognitive understanding of the issue.

"Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both we and our worlds have changed. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images have moved viewers over the last 120 years in ways that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe.
    This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
    Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media."
(If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at aivakhiv@uvm.edu.)

For millennia, gardens have been a medium with which to redeem nature from its ever-impending chaos. They play a key role in the survival strategies that art and culture can offer during the “age of the human.” Yet not all these strategies are the same: some of them, in fact, conceal forms of wildness or disorder that are rooted in systems of social oppression, resource exploitation, and the disrup- tion of planetary cycles. Taking her cue from an encounter with the Augmented Reality artist Tamiko Thiel and her eco-activist works, Serenella Iovino uses the garden as a lens to analyze the impacts of old and new forms of aestheticizing nature on the geology of our planet. Iovino focuses on landscapes of power and depletion, but also the creativity and possibility that are emerging from places
of resistance.
The essay is followed by a conversation with Tamiko Thiel.

This article presents a comparative analysis of HBO's mini-series Chernobyl (2019) and Svetlana Alexievich's literary testimonies Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997)-both of which represent the events and the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. As a case study in intermedial ecocriticism, the comparative study investigates the ability of each media product to make perceptible the forces of radiation, focusing in particular on what it feels like to inhabit the atmospheres of contamination that the two media products invite their viewers and readers to enter. The article proposes the neologism 'spectral toxicity' as a means to describe these atmospheres in which the presence of a threatening nonhuman force feels immanent and impending while also remaining imperceptible. Methodologically, the article is situated in the intersection of ecocriticism and intermedial studies, as it seeks to elucidate the phenomenologically distinct ways in which Voices of Chernobyl, as a literary work, and Chernobyl, as an audiovisual work, employ different aesthetic strategies to represent radiation and to mobilize affective experiences. The article argues that both works employ a type of indexical aesthetics, but that the choice of index differs depending on the modality of the media product. Whereas the mini-series constructs a rich soundscape and striking images of bodily decay, Voices of Chernobyl provides a polyphony of first-person testimonies about the dehumanizing experience of radiation exposure. By comparing the two media products in terms of the experiences they create, the study illustrates the varying affordances of literary and audiovisual media for representing the phenomenon of radiation and the consequences of nuclear disaster.

What does analyzing a text, or media, as a part of an 'ecology' actually mean? In advancing this question, Pringle emphasizes the historical role of the concept of digital information in the development of the term 'ecosystem.' As a hybrid term melding the study of the environmental-organic flows of biophysical reality (ecology) and the mechanisms of networked cohesion (system), ecosystem offers a way to theorize how machines mimic the animate and productive forces of life, while accounting for the automatic conversion of natural resources into energy, commodities, and waste through repetition and self-regulation. Ecosystem, Pringle argues, is a term of media that holds a strategically valuable historical relationship to proximate concepts, including economy, the psyche, apparatus, and digital information. Exploring these relationships provides a way to synthesize the animate qualities of life's cascade--ecology--with the automated patterns of production both defining energy flow in nature and giving the capacity for modes of work in the economy. The ecosystem, Pringle maintains, is a term of media advantageously positioned as a machine that maps the recursive traffic between the mediations of ecological and economic systems. https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9783957961488-Machine.pdf

This article shows how Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) transforms nature into a space of feminist possibility. In particular, I show how the film disrupts a dominant narrative within Western environmentalism, what Carolyn Merchant calls the Edenic recovery narrative. The traditional Edenic recovery narrative reproduces the dyadic relationship between woman/nature as passive (object) and man as active agent (subject). Yet, in disrupting the traditional Edenic recovery narrative, Fury Road allows for a representation of female nature that breaks from its traditionally accorded passive status. In the film, female nature gains agency not traditionally accorded to it. In this way, the film draws connections between women and nature, not in the service of capitalist patriarchy, but rather, as Alaimo writes, to re-cast nature as feminist space.

Duke University Press 2017:
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.

An examination of how environments are represented across media forms and how they mediate cultural practices. Media forms include landscape painting, nature photography, art installations, music, video games, science fiction, comics, podcasts, and eco-cinema. Cultural practices include romantic, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions, engaging with indigeneities, nationalism, environmentalism, settler colonialism, and warfare. The following ideas are braided through the course: the Environment in Media (or aesthetic framing of "nature"), Media for the Environment (such as advocacy for preservation), Environment as Media (found forms as vessels of meaning), and Media as Environment (immersion, etc.).

Martin Heidegger characterized the modern world as the “age of the world picture,” an era when the world became conquered as a picture or representation set fully and clearly before our gaze. In the 1960s, the first images of the Earth from space delivered a glimpse of a world picture that was global and ecological, but also suggested humanity’s domination both of the earth (today) and of outer space (tomorrow). Fifty years later, we have not colonized other planets, but we might speak instead of an age of the world motion picture, an era when our colonization extends to imaginary planets, like the Pandora of the blockbuster film Avatar (2009) and where we see our world and ourselves in turbulent and uncontrollable motion on screens around the globe. The moving image has been with us a little over a century and in that time the world has arguably come to move faster and faster all around us. For Gilles Deleuze it was cinema that provided the greatest resource for reviving our lost “belief in this world.” This chapter asks how cinema is faring today, on the cusp of the digital era, in supporting “belief in this world” and in the universe that sustains it. I examine five films made since 1968. The year in which we received the first images of the Earth from space: 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1973), Contact (1997), The Tree of Life (2011) and Melancholia (2011). Drawing on the semiotics of C. S. Pierce, I examine how images of the Earth in space have “moved” their viewers and how their use in these films facilitates new forms of global identity built on new emotional and spiritual geographies.

Panda Cams, which monitor and broadcast the activity of pandas in zoos or enclosed nature reserves, make an exceedingly rare and elusive species part of everyday life, creating the illusion of having unfettered access to the lives of these animals. They also represent a highly successful realization of the nature webcam’s potential, particularly in relation to managed environments. This article uses the Panda Cam as a case study to consider the unique ethics and implications of this relatively new method of observing and connecting with non-human animal life. To begin, this article contextualizes the out-of-proportion importance of pandas in the popular imagination. The charismatic panda has become (literally) emblematic of disappearing wildlife and the importance of conservation. The way pandas are presented, framed, and narrativized impacts human perceptions of the larger non-human world. The ubiquitous access enabled by webcam surveillance technology complements perceived connections with
pandas fostered by traditional media sources. However, the Panda Cam exacerbates traditional criticisms of zoos. For good or ill, zoos have long shaped how humans understand the natural world and their relation to it, and this technology stands to change how humans experience these institutions. The article also places the Panda Cam in relation to alternative methods of watching animals, specifically wildlife documentaries and webcams set up in the wild. I ultimately argue that the zoo webcam technology cannot replace those forms, but can supplement them in important ways – lacking the documentary’s careful curation or the
nature webcam’s illusion of a pristine and remote natural world. While acknowledging criticisms of the zoo webcam technology, this article argues that it would be a mistake wholly to reject a tool so successful in fostering affection and connection with a nonhuman species. One must recognize the good intentions and positive effects of this new technology, rather than castigating it for not conforming to an image of authentic nature. Yet, at this early stage, there still exists room for improvement. The technology in its current form often encourages a passive engagement with a subordinated natural world that audiences view on their own terms. In the future, this technology should strive to encourage a more active viewing experience and productively incorporate the frustration that often accompanies the physical zoo experience, or other nature webcams.

This article provides an environmental justice reading of the film Manufactured Landscapes and Edward Burtynsky's photographs. It focuses on representations of materiality, such as how the bodies of workers interact with the environmental toxins with
and in which they work, and the limits of an aesthetics of beauty to account for global consumer complicity and risk. Burtynsky’s deployment of a “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011) and the film’s
depiction of vital materiality ask audiences to reckon with the “dirty ecologies” (Morton 2009) of risk society’s “storied matter” (Bennett 2010), such as oil, e-waste, and invisible toxic fumes.
Burtynsky’s photographs foreground toxicity in ways that suggest that “beauty” is not a grounds for environmentalism in the Anthropocene, colluding with a paradigm of “health” that evades the “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010) of human bodies. Moreover, attachment to beauty and health might, in fact, ironically engender toxicity. Through the film, Burtynsky’s works make visible the externalized costs of global consumerism to very specific bodies and very specific environments, and
draw audiences materially into relation with those costs, emphasizing what is termed in this article a material relationality. The author concludes that, despite eliciting sharp scholarly criticism, the film and Burtynsky’s photographs call for an aesthetic sensibility and form capable of revealing how
materialism facilitates global environmental justice.

Juxtaposing real life environmental issues with cinematic metaphors in Chinese cinema, this chapter focuses on the ecological, interspecific fable between a human and a mermaid in Stephen Chow (周星驰)’s comedy The Mermaid (美人鱼, 2016), and discusses how mythical creatures and environments in the film serves both as a critique of environmental destructions in Hong Kong caused by excessive urban developments over the past two decades; and the allegories of postcolonial Hong Kong under drastic transformations. It illustrates how traditional Chinese folk legends are reimagined and recontextualized in the film, placing cultural imaginations of (post)colonial Hong Kong within ecocritical contexts, in order to facilitate our ecocritical awareness towards planetary healing from multispecies perspectives.

By focusing on its speciesist representations and difference between whimsical interspecific romance and “eco-empathy,” this chapter examines why The Mermaid, as a commercial film with an environmental message, falls short in various aspects to cultivate better viewers’ ecocritical awareness and convey more effective messages in  promoting planetary healing. Drawing from recent ecocritical works on affective ecologies (Choy 2011; Weik von Mossner 2017) and corporeal connections between humans, nonhuman animals and the environment/watercapes, from pink dolphins in Sha Lo Wan to the mythical mermaids in Stephen Chow’s comedy film, this chapter explores the extent in which mainstream fictional Chinese films could bring to light issues of interspecific connectivity and multispecies coexistence and harmony, in a region under drastic socioeconomic and environmental changes.

A brief genealogy of the term "ecosystem" in the context of the term's use in recent media discourse. This genealogy re-examines the term beyond the ideology of self-organization present in tech-utopianism, tracing and emphasizing how Jan Smuts’s idea of holism—and the racially segregated organizational structure it implies—has stayed the course alongside the history of the term.

The avant-garde blues of Captain Beefheart appeared out of the psychedelic moment in popular music, his career spanning the period of transition from AM pop to FM alternative rock radio in the USA, and the rise of pirate and then commercial and public service pop radio in Europe. Relatively unsuccessful commercially, Beefheart was a cult for hardcore fans and musicians. Among his unusual qualities was a powerful commitment to environmentalist themes in his songs and interviews. While individual songs by more popular artists raised such themes, especially about the threat of nuclear war and concerns about pesticides and air pollution, Beefheart was out on a limb musically, lyrically and politically. This chapter traces the curious concatenations of ecopolitics with dictatorial attitudes ascribed to Beefheart by members of his band; and the relations between his debts to African American traditions in music and the environmental themes of so many of his compositions.

Ecomedia is an emerging framework that views all media technologies and communications as embedded within a material and environmental reality.

Ecomedia Literacy offers a focused and practical guide to integrate the relationship between media and the environment—ecomedia—into media education. It enables media teachers to ‘green’ their pedagogy by providing essential tools and approaches that can be applied in the classroom.

Media are an essential feature of our planetary ecosystem emergency, contributing to both the problem and solution to climate chaos, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, water contamination, and so on. Offering a clear theoretical framework and suggested curriculum guide, Antonio Lopez provides key resources that will enable media educators to apply ecomedia concepts into their curricula. By reconceptualizing media education, this book connects ecology, environmental communication, ecomedia studies, environmental humanities, and ecoliteracy to bridge media literacy and education for sustainability.

Ecomedia Literacy is an essential read for educators and scholars in the areas of media literacy, media and communication, media and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and environmental studies.

Ecomedia Literacy is designed to be proactive, providing tools and approaches that can be applied in a variety of learning environments.

A practical guide for educators of media studies, cultural studies and digital humanities to incorporate ecomedia concepts into their curriculum and teaching methods.

Provides in-depth discussion of “ecomedia” (the relationship between media and environment).

Features a theoretical framework, curriculum structure, and lesson guides for specific activities and curriculum design.

Makes meaningful connections to develop a sense of purpose by synthesizing the domains of digital and living systems through an experiential approach to learning.

Promotes skills necessary for environmental challenges, include self-reflection, critical analysis, systems thinking, creativity, and visualization; and more traditional skills like literacy of media, information and technology.

Integrates concepts from education for sustainability, such as cultural preservation and transformation; responsible green citizenship; the dynamics of systems and change; sustainable economics; healthy commons natural laws and ecological principles; inventing and affecting the future; a sense of place.

Develops a theoretical approach that reimagines communication and media theories.

Explores an ecomedia literacy curriculum heuristic called the “ecomediasphere.”

Environmental themes and representations on screen are examined as a part of environmental social studies and can be considered a way of creating awareness of environmental issues. However, how often do we consider the environmental impact of a film or television shoot as an industrial process? In this article, I examine the sustainability practices in the motion picture industry and challenges to that by focusing on the British film and television industry as a case study. Using the interviews with industry representatives and some case studies, I discuss the possibilities of creating a change in behavior in the film industry, not only in terms of embedding green measures but also reconstituting industrial mechanisms on behalf of environmental sustainability.

This article analyses Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ 2012 interactive documentary, Bear 71.  Although Bear 71 has received no scholarly attention, it explicitly engages concerns that are central to animal studies, interdisciplinary environmental humanities, critical geography, and eco-media studies. The navigable digital environment that the text simulates and produces, represented through GIS technology, the videogame-like interactivity of that space with your own ‘avatar’, and the crittercam access to intimate, everyday animal life, all raise questions about how new media produces knowledge
about nature, the role of mapping tools such as Geographic Information Systems and scientific technologies like radio telemetry and crittercams in shaping human–animal relations, and the viability of an environmental ethic that bemoans the loss of nature ‘out there’. Drawing on scholarship about crittercams and wildlife, such as Benson’s Wired Wilderness and Donna Haraway’s Crittercam, and critical animal geography – especially
what Sarah Whatmore calls ‘hybrid geography’ – I argue that the film’s use and representation of interactive digital environments reveal the ways that humans and nature are entangled.

Music-making manifests variously in different times and places. In Western modernity, it emerged as "composition"--the creative activity of individual composer-subjects trained in the rules of composition and praised for their mastery of musical forms. Recently this tradition has been deconstructed by post-Cagean techniques and subsumed in a sea of hybrid, postmodern styles, blurring boundaries between serious and popular, composed and improvised, acoustic and technological, and between various musiclal traditions, with composition replaced to some extent by sampling and mixing. This paper probes and "decomposes" modernity's language of "composition" to get at its suppressed connections to ecological processes. If, as I argue, the soundtrack of postmodernity is the sound of decomposition, what is it that is decomposing around us, and what fungal growth emerge from its decomposing body? What are the implications of modernity's decomposition in the context of the ecotopian visions of green politics and the realities of global capital? The choice, I argue, is between a technocratic path that engineers global fashions and a bioregional path that attends to the decompositional moment of cultural productions and its interaction with local cultural "soils" and traditions.

ECOPIETY: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue -- coming in Fall 2019 from New York University Press. This book analyzes diverse representations of environmental moral engagement in contemporary mediated popular culture.  Taylor identifies and explores intertwining, co-constitutive, yet contrary, stories of what she terms “ecopiety” and “consumopiety” as they flow across multiple media platforms. How these stories compete and conflict, vying for space as contested narratives in the public imagination constitutes a central inquiry of the book. Drawing together theoretical insights from cultural studies, media studies, environmental humanities, and religious studies, Taylor offers a critical reading of primary source data drawn from such areas as the marketing of green consumer products, “greenwashed” corporate advertising, environmental mobile device applications, eco-themed reality television, the marketing of eco-funerals, Internet sharing of environmental tattoos, “green” fashion guides, and the media strategies of green hip-hop activism. Taylor makes the case that a detailed, multi-channel, cross-platform approach to cultural analysis is critical to understanding the kind of important “work” taking place as mediated popular culture plays an integral role in the “greening” of American moral sensibilities.  Ecopiety delves into the complex and contested processes of remaking our world and rescripting the future in the digital age—a time when storytelling processes themselves are shaping and being shaped by new media outlets and digital sharing technologies.

Amidst the historic and ongoing drought in the US southwest, images of desiccation along the Colorado River, the region’s lifeline, have proliferated in the popular media. Photos of cracked shorelines and bathtub rings lining the river’s reservoirs recall when, in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Gardens in the Dunes, Sister Salt encounters the empty riverbed downstream from the Parker Dam construction site along the California-Arizona border in the 1930s. Finding “silver-green carp belly-up, trapped in water holes” and “datura plants and wild purple asters on the riverbank suddenly left high and dry” (212), Sister Salt, Sister Salt mourns the river’s diversion as an ecological and cultural death as she watches the decline of local indigenous peoples traditionally (and cosmologically) dependent on the river’s waters.

In this presentation, I argue that Gardens in the Dunes joins a corpus of artistic and public engagements with the US southwest that curate specific, regional manifestations of the Anthropocene characterized by declining river ecologies, worsening drought, and indigenous water rights struggles. Gardens, as an environmental justice novel, both diagnoses the current water crisis as symptomatic of Reclamation Era dam projects and resultant water management systems and provides crucial context for the Tohono O’odham Nation’s water rights struggles in central Arizona. I complement this reading with an analysis of Mark Klett’s rephotographic survey of the US west, which works to materialize anthropogenic changes to regional topographies over time, and the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, which traces the history of the Hohokam people and their vast irrigation system and, because of its location in what Andrew Ross has called the least sustainable city in the world, calls contemporary resource ideologies into question. Taken together, novel, photographic collection, and museum highlight pre-development and cosmologically-based approaches to resource management and urge readers/viewers to think beyond dominant resource paradigms.

Focusing on Gabrielle Brady Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018, Germany, UK, Australia) , this presentation highlights multispecies coexistence and examines how the documentary sets in a Southeast Asian island depicts human and nonhuman displacements in the Anthropocene epoch in innovative ways. The film shows us three contrasting impressions of Christmas Island, each presenting one form of “displaced subject”: the asylum seekers, the local islanders of Chinese descent, and the 50 million red crabs migrating from the jungle to the coastline to lay their eggs. Together these displaced subjects inhabit the small island and represent imaginatively a world of entanglement that is characterized by the multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, cross-species kinships that transcend race, species and time.

However, this presentation also aims to demonstrate how an ecocritical, intersectional film analysis could expose our persistent anthropocentric tendency that refrains us from thinking beyond our geopolitical scope; and the challenge in adopting “a planet-centered mode of thinking”(Chakrabarty 2021) that promotes indiscriminatory care and empathy towards the vulnerable humans and nonhuman beings. It argues that unless we could finally resist the seduction of “Anthropocene’s visualization of itself and its aesthetic anaesthesia of the senses” (Mirzoeff 2014), to see beyond the beauty of the natural world, and confront the horror of the many layers of environmental realities; that we could begin to extend our indiscriminatory care, empathy and compassion to all vulnerable and precarious beings in the Anthropocene.

Big data and dataism can be considered as the emerging and renewed totalitarian ideology of neo-imperial capitalism. Within the contemporary economic and political production lines, human and nonhuman data is the capital of hegemonic power. On the other hand, administrators of corporate culture, such as Douglas Merill, Google’s former chief information officer and the founder of ZestFinance - a startup that leverages big data to provide credit scoring information note that they just don’t know how to use it yet. The problem seems to be located not only on innovating ways of mining exhaustive loads of data but also on making data ‘fertile’ for the sake of control through empirical and structural analysis.

The paper questions whether it would be possible to consider data and data analysis from a minor post-feminist perspective. It aims to present a critical perspective for big data. Considering data and data analysis as tools of precarious sustainability, ecomediatic data poses such questions: What is the nature of ‘infertile’ data that are excluded and expired within the dominant reasoning processing? If data and data analysis are becoming the ideological and hegemonic power of neocolonialist political economy, what kind of experimental audio-visual artworks offer new perspectives for pitching ecomediatic data?

Keywords: big data, noise, ecology, infertile data, credit, friction, control

Adopting the concept of “human gaze” by Randy Malamud  (2016), this paper provides a textual analysis of how the
environmental documentary Philippine Seas of the Philippine
television station GMA Network portrayed the sea and its components (i.e. species, landscapes) through their narratives, music, sound, and mise-en-scene. The documentary’s narrative or discussion is dominantly anthropocentric or human-centered in
character as it describes and treats the sea and its components as mere sources of materials for the fulfilment of the needs and other pleasures of humans. While there are small and infrequent moments when the narration in the documentary explicitly states that the sea “belongs” to marine creatures and that it is their habitat, the discussion always goes back to an exposition on how the sea and its components would be of benefit to the Filipino people in various aspects. This anthropocentric discourse leads to the portrayal of the sea and its components as subaltern. The subalternity of the sea and its creatures is textualized or represented in the documentary according to two tropes - infantilization and objectification. Infantilization could be observed through the documentary’s portrayal of the sea and its creatures as helpless sentient beings who have little to no ability to protect or defend themselves from human use or abuse. Related to this portrayal is the framing of human beings, including the host of the documentary, as the more powerful species who are able to serve as protectors, defenders, saviors, or stewards of them. Meanwhile, objectification of the seas and its components in the documentary could be seen in three ways – the portrayal of them as spectacle, as entertainment, and as materials for jthe fulfilment of human needs.

This is a chapter from the book ECOMEDIA: KEY ISSUES, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. In this essay, I argue that ecocriticism must pay attention to the flow of narratives, images, and other representations across media. Special attention given to the theories of Henry Jenkins and their application to the analysis of recent environmental activism surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline.

The era of cinema, some have argued, is ending. As the photo-realist recording of reality, the capture of reflected light on photochemical film, cinema is already a thing of the past. Defined as the production of moving images, however—as animation and transformation, the continual generation of new forms from material that may be “real,” indexical and mimetic, or that may be entirely composed and composited, reproductions without an original—cinema is still very much alive. In this latter sense, cinema is about morphogenesis: the generation of new forms from old ones, reproduced, reassembled, recomposed, and reimagined.
  This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it?
  The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?

Im Roten Salon der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz und im Babylon Kino Berlin Mitte fand vom 27. bis 29. November das Climate Cultures Festival statt. In den drei Sektionen Artic People/Climate Cultures, Petrocultures/Ölmoderne und Climate Fiction/Science Fiction ging es um vielfältige kulturelle und künstlerische Perspektiven auf die Klimakrise. Zu den Gästen, die teilweise live vor Ort, Online zugeschaltet oder in vorproduzierten Video-Interviews zu sehen und zu hören waren, zählten hochkarätige Expertinnen und Experten aus Wissenschaft und Literatur/Kunst. Aus den behandelten literarischen Werken wurde in Auszügen vorgelesen. Eine Fotoausstellung und Filmvorführungen im Abendprogramm komplettierten das ambitionierte Programm.

Climate change is a concern for many nations, industries, and citizens. However, for some it will also be a moment of opportunity. As witnessed in relation to the pandemic, dynamics of power have a particular purchase at moments of crisis. This article proposes a greater concern with questions of policy and power in relation to green strategies within the screen sector and highlights the role that media scholars might play in developing this critical lens. There has been a recent rise in efforts to mitigate particular environmental harms and the article outlines some of the initiatives that are emerging from both commercial and public bodies. At this moment, there are no shared systems for auditing and reporting, and few formal policies are widely recognised or adopted. As different ideas and approaches garner greater traction, travelling from one national and industrial setting to others, the article scrutinises the industrial, structural and policy obstacles which hinder a meaningful shift for film and television-production to be environmentally sustainable. The article reflects on the agendas and forces at play in this space and attempts to stimulate debate about how those researching media production might productively engage in critiquing these policies and dynamics of power.

Media are a powerful educational force that teaches about the relationship between humans and living systems while also physiologically impacting the environment. However, although long considered a tool for promoting critical thinking and cultural citizenship, media literacy does not adequately address environmental sustainability. Drawing on original research, Antonio López demonstrates how common media literacy practices reinforce belief systems at the root of unsustainable behaviors. By combining emerging literacies from social media, networked activism, sustainability education, critical media literacy, and digital ecopedagogy, the author offers a solutions oriented critique and paradigm-shifting reappraisal of media education by advocating “ecomedia literacy.” This groundbreaking book builds on López’s previous two books, Mediacology and The Media Ecosystem, by offering a cutting-edge and radical reappraisal of conventional media literacy practices. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, this book is ideal for students and educators of media literacy, media studies, and cultural studies, and will also be vital to those advocating sustainability education, environmental studies, and social justice.

Not just a reductionist representation of overpopulation, Soylent Green offers a nuanced critique of capitalism. In the course of the film, audiences learn that the seaplankton of which soylent green is supposedly composed no longerexists. The audience is horrified to discover by the end of the film that “soylent green is people.” While seemingly horrific, the notion of humans cannibalizing themselves in order to survive functions metaphorically for the system of capitalism, where human lives are cannibalized, wasted at ever accelerating rates in order to procure the most profit possible. In this respect, Soylent Green offers avisual representation of what Jason Moore calls the end of cheapfood. Yet, even as Soylent Green offers a powerful representation of capitalism’s crisis state in the era of the end of cheap food, the film asks audiences to re-invest in hegemonic white masculinity, a system of power and oppression intimately linked to capitalism. In particular, the film embodies what Hamilton Carroll writes about as white male injury, a new form of white masculine identity politics. Even as the film offers up a powerful critique of capitalism’s crisis state, it simultaneously does so through reproducing a discourse of white male injury.