An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.” The article contains the theoretical core of the book I’m currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my work in cinema and media studies, philosophy and sociology of religion, and process-relational ontology. As such it packs a lot in, and I would welcome any feedback on it (by email or comments below). As the book won’t be finished for a while, this piece is a good reflection of one of my current research directions.
The special issue grew out of a workshop at the National University of Singapore organized by John Whalen-Bridge, for which I’m deeply grateful. The issue has been skillfully edited by Whalen-Bridge and Lisa Sideris and includes articles by Sideris, Bron Taylor, and Luis Vivanco. It’s normally paywalled for 24 months, but the publisher has made the entire issue open access “for the foreseeable future,” so I would recommend that you read it while you can (if you don’t have institutional access to the journal).
The article can be read and downloaded here. My abstract reads as follows:
This article advances a four-fold contribution to theorizing the relationship between images, religion, and the Anthropocene. First, it proposes a ‘process-semiotic’ definition of the image as a sensorially perceptible form that mediates agential relations both between humans and between humans and the larger world. Second, it argues for a conception of religion and of spirituality that sees the world as varying on a scale between the ‘polytropic’ and the ‘monotropic’, where ‘tropism’ refers to the ‘turning’ toward sources of sustenance, relief, hope, authority, and the like. This turning is commonly, if not universally, accomplished with the aid of images. Bringing these ideas together, it then advances a typology of ‘image regimes’, each of which establishes relationships between understandings of images and of reality, relationships which can be traced across diverse religious and cultural contexts. Finally, it proposes a set of questions by which to bring ecocritical analysis to expressions of these image regimes in the emerging ‘image-world’ of digital culture, a culture that is coterminous, if not causally linked with, the growing recognition of the Anthropocene. It ends with a brief application of these questions to the Anthropocene Project, an art exhibition, film, and book project by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas De Pencier.
Note: If the article is not available when you are reading this, email me for a copy.
do mediums (motion film, paint on canvas, gifs, etc) make a difference or is this a universal principle/process)?
Not sure what you have in mind… On the one hand, every image (or image-event) is unique, whatever medium it may be found in. On the other hand, if there are such things as ‘image regimes’ (which I try to define and identify), then they do tend to be associated with certain technological capacities and systems. Gifs are a digital form, which only exists within complex digital information systems that did not exist in previous historical periods; they are very much connected to the digital ‘image-world’ (the last of the 6 image regimes I talk about). Motion film is connected with the fifth (the moving-image regime), thouogh it obviously continues in the 6th. Paint on canvas is most closely connected with the third (expressive-image regime), though the second (ideal-image) and first (animate-image) could be found in that form, too. All of that aside, I take some pains to point out that these are not historical epochs, but rather image-relations.
The short answer to your question: yes, of course, mediums make a difference. The image (as I define it) is a form of mediation which could not exist without materiality.