The first half of the article is an early version of the paper I gave at the recent Moving Environments conference, which encompassed material from the first two chapters of my forthcoming book Ecologies of the Moving Image. While the Film-Philosophy version is several months old now, it is the best statement published to date of my film-philosophy, which is expanded on at great length in the book. The article’s second half features an extended treatment of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker.
Henry Fox Talbot famously described photography as the “pencil of nature.” Although this metaphor refers to photography’s special relationship to the real, to the indexicality that makes it suited for naturalist representation, Talbot’s evocative phrase also raises important questions about photography’s relationship to nature. Beyond naturalism and nature appreciation, however, how has photography approached nature?
Environmental Humanities and the Challenge of Multidisciplinarity
A Workshop at the 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, “The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘The Three Narratives’—Art, Science, and Philosophy”
1. Find where nature and culture (river and engineering) slam into each other in a passionate wave. Ride it.
Observations: To enjoy it at all, you have to be good. Some of these guys (and women) are really good. If you stay up for more than the first couple of seconds, you’re in. 15 seconds, you’re good. 25 seconds, you’re great. A minute would be awesome; I didn’t see it, but some came close (into the 40s). Finally, when you gotta go down, find a graceful way to do it.
Here are my notes from Day 2 of the Moving Environments workshop in Munich. The same caveats apply as yesterday: they’re hastily typed up and reflect only my own interpretation of what transpired. If any of the participants would prefer not to have their ideas shared in this way, I will be happy to remove them upon request.
These are, needless to say, my own hastily drawn up notes (and I’m still a little jet-lagged from my arrival yesterday). Forgive the point form and abbreviation inconsistencies. Any errors are my own; any wonderful ideas are other people’s, unless specifically attributed to “ai.” Other initials refer to other speakers/participants. My tiredness toward the end of the day shows…
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. cine-ecocriticism) and the study of affect and emotion in film and visual culture. Since I’ve been asked by a few people to blog about it, I thought I might try my hand at live-blogging. Unfortunately a computer mishap yesterday and some online issues this morning have set me back with those goals, but I’ll share what I can, when I can.
The Integral Ecology reading group seems to have lost some of its momentum over the last 3-4 weeks (as witness the minimal responses to the lasttwo posts), but Nick, the “staunch Wilberian” of the group ;-), has now picked things up with his overview of Chapter 8 at the Integral Ecology Center blog.
(Hmm… With our arrival at IE’s home turf, might E and/or Z show up to comment on our comments?)
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has recently been alight with debates over the role of religion, God, theism versus nihilism, the secular and the “post-secular,” and other such things. Since these are topics I’m naturally interested, and somewhat invested, in, I ought to participate, but time constraints have made that all but impossible for me recently.
The latest issue of Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination — which looks like an excellent issue — includes a review of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” that reminds me how important it is to pay attention to the dialogical and heteroglossic texture of Malick’s films, and how easy it is to lose the path when one puts too much weight on a single line of text.
In response to my Dharma of file sharing post, visual artist Tom Gokey, whose work readers may know from Speculations journal, shared a link to his video on “Public Libraries, 3D Printing, FabLabs, and Hackerspaces.” It is… stunning in its implications. Just watch.
The democratization of production? The total plasticization of the world?
