My book Ecologies of the Moving Image takes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, so richly depicted in his celebrated 1979 film Stalker, as a kind of master metaphor for how cinema works and, by implication, how art in general works: it beckons its receiver into following it into a zone where, at best, anything can happen. The […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-culture’ Category
Ecologizing Radiohead
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Music & soundscape, tagged Brad Osborn, Britney Spears, Daydreaming, ecological psychology, ecology of perception, ecomusicology, J. J. Gibson, James J. Gibson, music psychology, music theory, musicology, perceptual ecology, process-relational thought, Radiohead, Stockhausen, The Pyramid Song, Thom Yorke on January 21, 2021 | 2 Comments »
What better way to understand ecological perception than by applying it to a study of the music of Radiohead, right? Okay, I’ll explain. “Ecological perception” is not what you might think. (And it isn’t what I, in my writing, call “perceptual ecology.“) It is a psychological theory that studies the perception of an organism (such […]
Streaming media’s environmental impact
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged carbon footprint, data centers, digital media, ecological footprint, environmental impact, industrial ecology, Laura Marks, media ecology, Media+Environment, pedagogical media, streaming media on October 16, 2020 | 3 Comments »
Cross-posted with the EcoCultureLab blog. Media+Environment has just published another article in its “States of Media and Environment” series, and this one should be of broad interest to environmental educators, media scholars, and environmentally concerned media users. “Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact” draws attention to an unpopular but inescapable issue: the adverse environmental effects of streaming media. […]
Deep Adaptation & its critics: a question of reality
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged Deep Adaptation, ecospirituality, environmentalism, Jem Bendell, Open Democracy, radical environmentalism, religion and ecology, societal collapse, spiritual environmentalism, spiritual movements on July 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »
I’ve long been receptive to the idea that we need a spiritual, or even a religious, movement to address the climate crisis. Of course, I define both “spiritual” and “religious” quite broadly, and am well aware of how both terms have been shaped within histories that are Eurocentric and dominated by monotheistic, Christian, and more […]
Mapping identities in global cultural studies
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged anthropology of globalization, capitalism, cognitive capitalism, colonialism, cosmopolitics, critical realism, cultural identity, cultural studies, cultural theory, decoloniality, ecocultural identity, etic, global cultural studies, globalization, identity politics, modernism, modernity, modernization, multiple modernities, postmodernization, reflexive modernization, reflexivity, sociology of globalization, tradition, traditionalism, traditionalization on May 28, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, […]
Planet of Some Humans
Posted in Cinema, Climate change, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged apocalypticism, becoming human, Bil McKibben, biocentrism, climate change communication, climate change politics, Deep Adaptation, deep ecology, degrowth, diversity, doomism, ecodocumentaries, ecopolitics, energy politics, films, green energy, Green New Deal, Malthusianism, Michael Moore, Planet of the Humans, post-human, Vermont on May 1, 2020 | 5 Comments »
This past week has seen a firestorm of reaction among environmentalists and climate and energy scientists to the online release of the film Planet of the Humans. Written, directed, and produced by first-time director Jeff Gibbs, but — much more importantly — executive-produced and actively promoted by Michael Moore, the film is incendiary and intentionally […]
Earth Week posts
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged Earth Week, Earth Week 2020, EarthDay+50, EcoCultureLab on April 24, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been posting short pieces all this week in connection with EcoCultureLab‘s EarthDay+50 events, which include talks and a student arts exhibition. You can read the posts here: Monday: Frozen Moment Tuesday: Art and Sustainability in a Pandemic Wednesday (Earth Day): The Day Itself Thursday: Creativity is Not Optional Friday: What We Did, What Will […]
The world’s downtown
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged Coronavirus, David Remnick, E. O. Wilson, ecomodernism, half-earth, Maintenance Art Manifesto, Manhattan, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York City, New Yorker, pandemic politics, sanitation workers, wildlife protection on April 13, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
With New Yorkers forced to stay home, and arts organizations getting creative in how they are making available their offerings, The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section has suddenly become more relevant to the rest of us, whose visits to the city were previously so infrequent as to make reading it a form of […]
Media+Environment has launched
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged ecocinema studies, ecomedia, ecomedia studies, media ecologies, media ecology, Media+Environment, open access on November 26, 2019 | 3 Comments »
Media+Environment, the new, open access, online, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research published by the University of California Press, has launched its first issue and thematic stream, on “The States of Media+Environment.” The introduction can be read here. Articles can be accessed here.
Climate Action Week: What to watch for
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged capitalism, climate communication, climate movement, ClimateJustice, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, memetic warfare, UN Climate Action Summit on September 16, 2019 | 3 Comments »
As people around the world prepare for Global Climate Strike Week (Sept. 20-27) and for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City on Sept. 23, here are some thoughts and sources to help us think about what’s at stake, what’s possible, and what we can do. This blog may be updated as needed, […]
Tangerine Reef
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged Animal Collective, coral reefs, Coral Videography, International Year of the Reef on January 28, 2019 | 3 Comments »
And here is Animal Collective’s beautiful International Year of the Reef collaboration with marine biology art-science duo Coral Morphologic, entitled Tangerine Reef: More on Coral Videography, “pioneers of avant-garde coral macro-videography,” on their web site.
Beyond sustainability’s 3 pillars: an exercise in eco-political ontology
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged Anthropocene, decoloniality, ecology, environment, environmental sociology, environmental thought, four pillars of sustainability, governance, governmentality, land, markets, Marshall Sahlins, Ontology, epistemology, people, political sociology, state, sustainability, sustainability science on December 1, 2017 | 9 Comments »
It’s become a cliché for people in environmental, policy, and even corporate circles to talk about the “triple bottom-line,” or the “three pillars” or “three-legged stool,” of sustainability. Those “pillars” are almost universally understood to be the economic, the environmental, and the social (sometimes rendered, more trenchantly, as social justice). Some have argued that a fourth, the cultural, should […]