Two recent talks of mine just became available on YouTube. They are “The New Ecologies of Images: Ecomedia Ontology in the Capitalocene,” given in January at the Visual Ecologies conference in Strasbourg, and “Ecologies of the Multipolar Information Disorder: On Recent Elections, Current Wars (and Coups), and Climate Disasters to Come,” given last month at the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. The two overlap significantly — the first two-thirds of the latter are a slightly modified version of the former — so there’s no reason to watch both.
If you’re theory-averse — both take some time to present the theoretical framework I bring to studying images, including moving images (as in Ecologies of the Moving Image) and digital images (in the forthcoming The New Lives of Images) — you might want to just skip to the 28-minute mark of the second video. That’s where I focus in on the current political issues encompassed in the sub-title (and not so much on the climate disasters, which I’ve covered in other talks you can find on my web site, in the side-bar next to this post in Immanence, or through a YouTube search). It’s a bit of a précis of the thinking I’ve been sharing on this blog and working through in my writing of the book I had been calling Stormy Weather, up until William Connolly came out with a brilliant book of that title. I haven’t come up with an adequate replacement title yet, but pieces of it have also come out in my talks at the SFU Institute for the Humanities conferences on Fascist Neoliberalism and the Fate of Radical Democracy, last year, and on Apocalyptic Anxieties the previous year.
Here’s “Ecologies of the Multipolar Information Disorder”: