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Mormon film ecologies

November 16, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I did a double-take when a producer from BYU Radio — Brigham Young University’s faith-and-values based talk radio station, which broadcasts to millions around the world through Sirius XM satellite radio — approached me for an interview about Ecologies of the Moving Image. I presume the majority of listeners are members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, i.e., Mormons, as is a good portion of the content. (Which got me interested in LDS cinema. Go figure.)

The interview was live-broadcast on the station’s morning show last week. You can listen to it here, starting at about the 84-and-a-half minute mark and running for 20-odd minutes to the end of the show.

I found its morning show host Marcus Smith to be charming, intelligent, and very open-minded.

 

 

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Society & Space interview

November 8, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Society and Space has posted a conversation/interview that Harlan Morehouse carried out with me in early October.

While it’s focused on Ecologies of the Moving Image, we talk about plenty of other things — nature and culture, the eco-humanities, the Anthropocene, ontology, critical geography, Buddhism, Zizek, Peirce, nationalism, withdrawn objects, and more. And plenty of films, from Westerns and Bergfilmen (Weimar Germany’s mountain films) to science-fiction, Children of Men, Avatar, and the work of Herzog, Von Trier, and others.

(Had the interview taken place just a few days later, we would have talked about Gravity, too. What a film.)

Read the whole thing here.

 

 

Posted in Cinema, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Reading AIME

November 8, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m just managing to keep up with the Latour/AIME reading groups (both the one on my campus and the online one organized by Adam Robbert et al.), but not so much with the commentaries. Here’s my first brief reflection on the book…

1. You know that a scholar has made it to the top of the French academic heap when he can publish a 500-page book that lacks a single bibliographic reference.

2. That said, the references are evident for longtime readers of Latour, as the book is a culmination of Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

Documenting the act of killing

October 23, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The following is reblogged, excerpted and modified, from e²mc.

How do films deal with historical atrocities? And how might they enable them in the first place?

The Act of Killing is Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling documentary about the perpetrators of the mass murders committed by the Suharto regime’s paramilitary death squads in mid-1960s Indonesia. The filmmakers interview some of the worst of the perpetrators and — controversially — invite them to re-enact the killings for the camera, filming these scenes in the style of their favorite film genres. This interplay between mass murder and Hollywood movies — gangsters, westerns, and musicals — is a focus of the film.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Cinema, Politics, Visual culture | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

What’s real

October 21, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Conversation overheard between an ambitious grad student and a simpleminded process-relational philosopher . . .

 

      Jake Wanano-Everton:   Sir, where do you draw the line between what’s real and what’s not real?

      Prof. Noah Fewthings:   The only things that are real are the moments of experienced reality — drops of experience, let’s call them — pulsing through the vector stream of the universe right now. There are lots and lots of them, too many to count: what you and I are experiencing right now are only two, or more accurately some, of billions and billions unfolding at this moment. And this one. And this one. They are all that’s real; and they are irreducibly real.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Say what? (going solar)

October 15, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Nothing like a bit of good news* to make us feel that the fight against fossil-fuel gangsters is worth continuing…

“We’re actually winning the fight against climate change, but most people don’t know it yet.”

And this:

“Within eighteen months . . . solar will be able to compete in three-quarters of the world’s electricity markets without subsidies.

See Will Solar Save the Planet? | The Nation

Continue Reading »

Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Realism & Peirce

October 14, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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Levi is out swinging (in the most entertaining way possible; I love it when he gets on a roll, and I do agree with him on much of it).

Of course, there’s not much new in what he says (that hasn’t been said by Left-realists for the last few decades, and by Latour more recently). But of course it still needs to be said (in some circles, like to Left anti-realists) and it’s better said by constructivist realists (like Bryant, Latour, et al.) than by anti-constructivists (on the Right or Left). Constructivist realism — a realism that avows the constructedness (enactedness, emergentness, historicity) of everything, from quarks to civilizations to universes — is where things are at. (Which is why I appreciate Levi’s philosophizing so much.)

The comments that follow his post include some rejoinders from Peircians (like Mark Crosby and Matt Segall), who don’t like Bryant’s seeming characterization of Charles Sanders Peirce as an anti- or non-realist. In response, Levi writes that “we never really see Pierce employed outside the humanities.” Here he needs to be corrected.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments »

Objectivity 2.0?

October 14, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Continuing on the “sciencey” thread from this post… (I’ll come back to the “14 billion years” issue, since it’s been pointed out to me that my criticism of the concept of measuring time would only apply — if the scientists are correct — to the first few seconds or so of the universe.)

 

http://normangalinsky.com/images/large/ImplicateOrder.300f.jpg

 

Here’s a question for all of you:

What does the universe look like to an objective observer?

Let’s unpack some of the assumptions and traps hidden inside this question.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Science & society | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Under Western Skies CFP

September 18, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Under Western Skies: Intersections of Environments, Technologies, and Communities

September 9 – 13, 2014
Mount Royal University
Calgary, AB CANADA

Under Western Skies is a biennial, interdisciplinary conference on the environment. The third conference welcomes academics from across the disciplines as well as members of artistic and activist communities, non- and for-profit organizations, government, labour, and NGOs to address collectively the environmental challenges faced by human and nonhuman actors.

The conference is held on the Mount Royal University campus (Calgary, Alberta, CANADA) in the LEED Gold-certified Roderick Mah Centre for Continuous Learning.

Keynote speakers for the 2014 conference include:

Continue Reading »

Posted in Academe | 1 Comment »

Mosaïcultures

September 16, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Some pictures from the Mosaïcultures international exhibition of horticultural arts at Montreal’s Botanical Gardens. The exhibition continues until September 29.

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Lise Cormier’s Mother Earth

Continue Reading »

Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

“14 billion years” (a pet peeve)

September 13, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

http://www.antheapolsonart.com.au/images/61.jpg

When people say “the universe began 14 billion years ago,” do they realize that this is not true in the slightest?

It’s not true not because they aren’t measuring things accurately. Rather, it’s not true because the standards of measurement cannot have possibly remained unchanged over such a time period.

To put it crudely, this is because Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , | 7 Comments »

EMI online course

September 11, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Cross-posting from e2mc:

I’ve begun teaching a course on film and ecology and using my book Ecologies of the Moving Image as the main text.

Since the topic is related to the theme of this blog, and since I’ll be creating reading guides and posting links to film clips and related materials for my students, I thought I might as well share those publicly here.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Cinema | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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