immanence

I’ll be participating in the Mellon-sponsored Environments and Societies Colloquium Series next Wednesday, April 30, at the University of California Davis.

My colloquium paper, entitled “On Matters of Concern: Ecology, Ontological Politics, and the Anthropo(s)cene,” is available for reading on the E & S website. (It’s a variation of a chapter for a book on “integral ecologies” which is currently in the peer-review stage.)

The following day I’ll be giving a talk at the same university. Below are the details.

“From the Age of the World Motion Picture to the Archive, the Cloud, and the Commons”

May 1, 2014 3:00-4:30 pm, Olson 53A

This talk will skirt across the history of cinema to locate its essence as movement, animation, and transformation. With the aid of the process-relational metaphysics of C. S. Peirce and A. N. Whitehead, we will probe beneath the cinema of eco-trauma — from eco-docs like An Inconvenient Truth to epic fables like Avatar  — into the materiality of the medium itself, with its dependence on sunlight, fossil fuels, and their photochemical derivatives.

Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form? Amidst the slippery, morphing images of digital media, can we find the beginnings of a post-carbon cinema practice? In the accumulating archive of images and data — whose materiality is wished away in the nebulous “cloud,” even as it relies on massive server farms, transoceanic cable networks, mountains of e-waste, and growing oceanic garbage patches — where is there a space for the reimagining of a trans-human commons, an aesthetic and ethical practice for a post-carbon “posthumanity”?

Adrian Ivakhiv is Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont. His books include Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013) and Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (2001). He blogs at Immanence: Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, Mediapolitics.

This event is sponsored by Religious Studies with funds form the Paul A. and Marie Castelfranco Endowment; Comparative Literature; Cinema & Technocultural Studies; French; English; Cultural Studies

For more information please contact: Ted Geier tegeier@ucdavis.edu

See poster here

Image above is taken from Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.