As the world breathes a sigh of relief that this meeting happened at all, ecocritics can wonder about the semiotics of the image framing Chairman Xi Jinping’s meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Relief : Is this: China as a force of nature? Xi backed by the power of the Earth itself? Blinken […]
Archive for the ‘Visual culture’ Category
Sigh/n of relief
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged China, geopolitics, political semiotics, Xi Jinping on June 19, 2023 | 1 Comment »
Scenes in the image-world
Posted in Visual culture, tagged Anthropocene, books, image ecologies, image regimes, image-world, media ecologies, media studies, The New Lives of Images, visual culture, visual studies on June 26, 2020 | 2 Comments »
Here’s a preview in section headings of the book I’m currently writing. It presents a way of thinking about images, what they’ve done for people, and how all of that figures into the contemporary world of digital media. It then applies that way of thinking to three sets of images: about humans as the stars […]
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 […]
R.I.P. Cassini
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Visual culture, tagged Blade Runner, Cassini, images, moving image, seeing, visuality on September 16, 2017 | 4 Comments »
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…” 62 moons orbiting in and around the grooved rings of Saturn. Winter and spring, hurricanes, jet streams, and auroras. Rivers and deltas pelted by methane rains on Titan. Hydrothermal vented oceans, and geysers shooting plumes of water that fall back as snow on Enceladus. Moons forming spiral waves cresting […]
Loznitsa’s ethical witnessing
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged Auschwitz, Austerlitz, concentration camps, death camps, documentary, eco-trauma, ethical witnessing, Holocaust, Holocaust tourism, Serhii Loznitsa, tourism, Ukrainian cinema, W. G. Sebald on October 25, 2016 | 3 Comments »
I’ve written about ethical witnessing before — both in the eco-trauma chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image and in my reflections on Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. Seeing Serhii Loznitsa‘s latest film, Austerlitz, at Kyiv’s Molodist Film Festival a few days ago, prompted me to think some more about how a seemingly neutral camera, […]
Fort McMurray as fictive image
Posted in Climate change, Visual culture, tagged Anthropocene, climate denialism, climate science, environmental communication, fact, Latour, mediation, rhetoric, science studies on May 9, 2016 | 7 Comments »
With reality like this, who needs fiction? It’s from Fort McMurray, last week. Harrowing. While the impact of such images is undeniable, the debate over whether and how they are related to climate change is a debate the rest of us should not shy away from.
How to die in the Anthropocene
Posted in Visual culture, tagged Bowie on January 11, 2016 | 4 Comments »
He left us with this to mull over. (Thanks to Roy Scranton for the title idea.)
The semio-ethics of Coke’s polar bear mascots
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged animals, branding, brands, Coca-cola, environmental communication, mascots, polar bears, WWF on October 16, 2014 | 2 Comments »
A journalist asked me to say something about the use of animal mascots for commercial purposes. In an email, she wrote: “What does a brand owe an animal mascot, especially one at risk? For instance, polar bears face rapid habitat loss, yet Coke has only donated $2 million to the WWF for conservation efforts. There’s also Kellogg’s […]
Apocalypse mashup
Posted in Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged apocalypse, eco-images, global warming on September 18, 2014 | 1 Comment »
This week’s theme in my “Environmental Literature, Arts, & Media” class is apocalyptic rhetoric. (I’m loosely following Greg Garrard’s list of tropes in Ecocriticism, but adding, amplifying, and amending to be more artistically inclusive.) Because it’s a fun topic (and deadly serious, too), I thought I’d post a few of the videos we’ve been watching […]
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