I’m in Munich at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), where I’m participating in a workshop called Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema. The workshop has been convened by Center associates Alexa Weik von Mossner and Arielle Helmick, and features some leading figures in the fields of ecocinema studies (a.k.a. […]
Archive for the ‘Media ecology’ Category
Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, & Ecocinema (live blog?)
Posted in Media ecology on July 22, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Stalking the cinema stalking the world
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged Chernobyl, Tarkovsky on April 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Here’s a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the film in its relationship to […]
Music of the turning earth…
Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, Spirit matter on April 23, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Today’s link dump is devoted to sound, earth, religion, language, and the creativity of friends… First the sounds. Here’s Science Friday’s Earth Day episode on the origins of music in the Great Animal Orchestra; and what American English sounds like to non-English speakers (hilarious):
Cronon, Chomsky/Foucault, & public reason
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, Media ecology, Process-relational thought, tagged aesthetics, Chomsky, Cronon, Foucault, Politics, Wisconsin on March 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The Bill Cronon-Wisconsin Republican party tangle is making me — and many others, judging by the responses I’ve seen on academic listservs — think a little more deeply about how we use our e-mail addresses. Like many, I’m troubled by the possibility that someone could ask to see my e-mail correspondence on any old topic. […]
Scholar goes citizen goes viral
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Politics on March 27, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The story of the Wisconsin Republican Party vs. environmental historian Bill Cronon makes for a rare example of a single academic’s blogging activism (blogtivism, to use that ugly word) going viral. You’ve probably heard the basic outline of what’s happened already: Cronon became interested in finding out who was behind the controversial legislation crafted by […]
Religion & the Japanese tragedy
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]
Observations: politics – media – empathy
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged eventology, Japan tsunami, media ecology, new media, political ecology, Politics on March 15, 2011 | 1 Comment »
A few observations from the events of the last week or so: (1) Tsunamis happen. When they do, in a globally media-connected world, they bring us all a little closer together. (Not all of us; those who don’t wish to be brought closer may drift further apart. But, to risk getting overly psychoanalytical, those who’ve […]
Open movie culture
Posted in Media ecology on March 7, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Among the freely watchable films Open Culture includes in their 340 Free Movies Online list are films by Tarkovsky (all of them!), Godard (Breathless, King Lear), Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove), Jarman (Caravaggio), Hawks (His Girl Friday), Bunuel (L’Age d’Or), Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog), Kurosawa (Rashomon, Throne of Blood), Dreyer (Vampyr), Greenaway […]
Metaphorics of “revolution” & “rebellion”
Posted in Media ecology, tagged media, NPR, public radio on March 6, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
When we hear about a Twitter and Facebook “revolution” in “X Square” or in a city in Libya, do we get keyed up? When we later hear about “rebels” and “civil war” somewhere in Africa (in that same Libya), do we tune out? This week’s On the Media — one of the best hours of […]
Revolutionary democracy
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged Badiou, Egypt, media, nonviolence, Obama, Politics, revolution on February 27, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Here are a few thoughts after watching Frontline’s Revolution in Cairo, which is a very good 24-minute summary of how this particular democratic moment occurred, and after reading Badiou‘s, Hardt & Negri’s, Hallward‘s, Amit Rai‘s, and some other takes on the events. (1) The recipe: Tools + Techniques + Events + Vision = The revolution(s) […]
Spreading revolution
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged Egypt, multitude, posthegemony, revolutions on February 15, 2011 | 3 Comments »
The New York Times has a couple of nice pieces on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions: an interactive account of the key events and a more detailed piece outlining the role of the different protest groups, bloggers and Facebook-ites, nonviolent resistance tactics, and the Obama administration. A few quick thoughts: 1) Max Forte is right […]
Whitehead & media theory
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, tagged Whitehead on February 8, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Jussi Parikka at Machinology is reporting on media theorist Mark Hansen’s move from a focus on media objects to a Whiteheadian focus on media processes. A few quotes: “Well known are the Whitehead writings of Massumi and Manning in Montreal, and of course the recent Whitehead writings of Steven Shaviro, the debates around object oriented […]