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Archive for the ‘Media ecology’ Category

food & desert mansions

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged , on March 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

(great scenes, part 4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxpfO90mg8&hl=en_US&fs=1& A propos the previous post… This may be one of Antonioni’s worst, or at least most dated, films, but the climactic scene is certainly memorable, especially if you know Pink Floyd’s “Careful with that axe, Eugene” (though, honestly, once the screaming starts, the music feels pretty dated too). It’s a […]

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more great scenes

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged on March 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

From Bande a Part. (Thanks to Annette for suggesting it.) Or these two from Blow Up: But I distinctly remember someone else coming along and kicking what was left of Jeff Beck’s guitar neck right after this. Am I misremembering? Did I see something that was never there in the first place, like the David […]

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spring

Posted in Media ecology on March 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

While it may be the first day of spring, traveling to warm places makes it easy to forget what that means. I’ve been enjoying LA and the SCMS all this week. Besides the three sessions devoted explicitly to ecology and cinema (or ecocriticism and cinema), there have been papers and sessions on animals, water, ecocide […]

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cinema, ontology, ecology

Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on March 14, 2010 | 8 Comments »

I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed. Here’s one articulation of that model. [. . .]

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Bigelow, Cameron, & the aesthetics of immersion

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged , on March 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Steven Shaviro has a very nice post about Kathryn Bigelow following her Best Picture and Best Director wins at the Oscars. Shaviro celebrates her “poetics of vision” and aesthetics of “sensory immersion.” On her earlier film Point Break, he writes: “everything comes out of, and returns back to, the element of water. Bigelow shows us […]

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Canada’s big (schmaltzy) sell

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , on March 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

The Olympics are many things. Some of them are obvious: a celebration of sport, physical achievement, and excellence; a way to bring nations together in competitive cooperation (or cooperative competition) rather than in war. Others take a few moments’ reflection to notice: they are a way for local, and sometimes national, coalitions of business interests […]

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weird life, shadow biospheres, dark signs… & quakes

Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on February 27, 2010 | 23 Comments »

The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we […]

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morsels

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , on February 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

First, for anyone living in a JonStewartless alternate universe… Stewart (and Samantha Bee) giving Glenn Beck a history lesson (about progressivism) was pretty funny. Beck may be a cheap target, but it’s also a cheap (free) history lesson. Take this country back, Glenn, way back… www.thedailyshow.com Next, Denmark’s new tourist ad campaign by Lars von […]

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Swift/climate/boating the media

Posted in Climate change, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , on February 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Having published the results of its 12-part investigation into the leaked/hacked climate scientist e-mails at the University of East Anglia, the Guardian is now inviting “web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.” It’s a kind of public version of peer review for […]

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Bergson & the universal image machine

Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2010 | 13 Comments »

There’s something about our time that is very Bergsonian, in the sense that there’s a kind of simultaneous opening up of the past and the future, the former feeding the possibilities of the latter. At the same time as new technological tools propel us ever forward on trajectories of embodied interactivity (the internet, iPod-iPhone-iPad, YouTube, Facebook-Twitter, etc.), recording technologies (those that preserve something of the present for the future) combine with technologies of retrieval (those that unlock the past, from historical and archaeological tools to sampling technologies, about which see Copyright Criminals) to enable an ever deeper digging into and opening up of the past. In the process, the past becomes fuel for the reinvention of ourselves toward the future, this reinvention always taking the form of images — which, for Bergson, are central, the shimmering half-way point between mind and matter. [. . .]

Meanwhile, new films are made from the images of the past. This documentary on “Krautrock,” the German progressive, avant and space rock movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, is quite good: [. . .] The music had its fans at the time (more in the UK than in North America), but the documentary does a great job putting it into the much broader context of post-war Germany, the 1960s, the psychedelic revolution, and all that. And yet somehow it doesn’t feel dated to me; on the contrary, it feels as fresh as tomorrow’s news, because I know there are fans out there, Radiohead generation kids and remixers and whoever else listening to these things and reviving them in ways I wouldn’t have imagined possible back in the days when the music industry seemed like one stifling oligopoly.

None of these are standard History Channel fare. All are products of the internet and MP3-era explosion of musical tastes, one of the cultural victories of our day — the losers being the big music corporations, or at least what they stood for. The corporations themselves are still around, of course, doing the same thing corporations do, and even if they weren’t, they would simply have been replaced by others, made from the same movable parts of the corporate machine. But technology moves forward despite them. [. . .]

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ways to shoot starlings

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged , , , on January 18, 2010 | 2 Comments »

“Shoot” as in film, photograph, capture and display, but also fly with them, shoot the rapids of their movement, accompany them, become starling. These mesmerizing videos of moving masses of starlings, “murmurations” as they’re called, like other YouTube animal videos, tell us as much about the phenomenon being watched as about those watching it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE&hl=en_US&fs=1&

It all gets going here at around the 3’20” mark. But it would be nice if we were given some alternative soundtrack options. Like this one, with no commentary, just a few intertitles, set to the music of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble:

[. . .]

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Hell, nature, & justice in Haiti

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , on January 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »

What do we do in the aftermath of such a disaster, except to express profound sadness, shock, and sympathy, and to send donations to aid and relief organizations working in the affected areas? How do we even portray it in a way that respects the victims? Citizen media, according to Media Nation blogger Dan Kennedy, […]

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