{"id":14491,"date":"2026-06-11T17:59:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T22:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=14491"},"modified":"2026-06-12T01:04:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T06:04:20","slug":"has-ecocinema-peaked-on-being-stalked-by-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2026\/06\/11\/has-ecocinema-peaked-on-being-stalked-by-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Has ‘ecocinema’ peaked? On being stalked by AI…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Five hundred scholarly citations is not a lot in some fields (Thomas Kuhn\u2019s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/a><\/em> has been cited at least 167,000 times). But it\u2019s exciting to learn that my 2013 book Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature<\/a><\/em> passed the 500 citation mark in Google Scholar<\/a>, at some point recently. As far as I can tell, that makes it the most cited<\/a> book in the field of ecocinema studies, though it may depend on how we define that field. I\u2019ll take this occasion to think a bit more about the evolution of \u201cecocinema studies\u201d and what it might mean for us today, in the era of digital media and AI. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is “ecocinema studies”?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe the first time the term \u201cecocinema\u201d was used in a work of film criticism (hyphenated as \u201ceco-cinema\u201d in that case) was by Scott MacDonald in 2004<\/a>. Though it predated his use of the term, MacDonald’s 2001 book The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place<\/a><\/em> was one of the earliest books we can retrospectively call “ecocinema studies.” I recognized some other antecedents in my 2008 ISLE<\/em> overview of the genre<\/a> as it was developing then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

To date, Google Scholar cites just under 4,000 results for the search term \u201cecocinema<\/a>\u201d (and just over that for \u201cecomedia<\/a>,\u201d though the numbers of both seem to vary day to day). That said, the study of the relationship between ecology\/environment and cinematic media goes back a lot further and includes fields like environmental communication, film studies more broadly, and the ecologically informed study of specific genres like wildlife documentaries, Hollywood westerns, and others. If we include the wildlife documentary studies genre, at least two books, Greg Mitman\u2019s Reel Nature<\/a><\/em> (1999) and Derek Bous\u00e9\u2019s Wildlife Films<\/a><\/em> (2000), are more widely cited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pushing outward to include books about media and the environment brings in a whole range of other scholars whose works have certainly been more impactful: I\u2019m thinking of authors like Sean Cubitt, Jussi Parikka, Jennifer Gabrys, Nicole Starosielski, Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell, and Lisa Parks. Then there is the study of cinematic representations of climate change, as carried out by environmental communication scholars like Anthony Leiserowitz, Max Boykoff, and Rachel Howell; of landscapes and environments more generally, as studied by cinema geographers like Stuart Aitken, Chris Lukinbeal, and Martin Lefebvre; and of animals and human-nonhuman relations, by scholars like Anat Pick, Akira Lippit, and Jonathan Burt. The field of environmental communication has also provided key insights for ecocinema scholars, with the work of Robert Cox, Phaedra Pezzullo, Jennifer Burgess, Matthew Nisbet, Alison Anderson, and Anders Hansen being especially relevant. And there\u2019s also the tangentially connected field of cinema perception, which includes work like Joseph Anderson’s<\/a> that draws on the \u201cecological psychology\u201d of James J. and Eleanor Gibson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what makes \u201cecocinema studies\u201d its own field, different from the others? It\u2019s both more specific \u2014 it studies cinematic (moving-image) media, not media in general \u2014 and broader, in that it studies much more than just \u201crepresentations\u201d of environments in cinema. Ecocinema studies encompasses the study of the relationship between cinema and ecology, which is both a theoretical and empirical study, and which deals not only with representations (things shown in films) but with filmmaking practices and infrastructures, film viewing cultures, and, really, the entire life-cycle of cinema as something that produces visions and worlds for viewers to engage with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And while some ecocinema studies scholarship focuses on a subset of cinema that might qualify as “ecocinema,” because its themes and\/or methods are somehow ecologically informed, most ecocinema studies scholarship does not restrict itself in that way. Rather, it applies ecocritical methods (i.e., ecologically informed cultural critique) to studying any and all cinema. And since ecocriticism these days offers a capacious range of analytical tools, incorporating “social” or “political ecologies” as well as “media ecologies” (or perceptual-infrastructural ecologies) alongside the usual sense of ecology as material and biophysical, that can make the field quite broad.* <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many people have made the field what it is today: a good shout-out list would include some of those already mentioned (Scott MacDonald, Sean Cubitt) alongside David Ingram (whose pathbreaking 2005 book Green Screen<\/a> <\/em>might be the current runner-up with over 450 citations), Pat Brereton, Robin Murray and Joe Heumann, Salma Monani, Stephen Rust, Janet Walker, E. Ann Kaplan, Hunter Vaughan, Nicole Seymour, Jennifer Fay, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Pietari K\u00e4\u00e4p\u00e4, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Alenda Chang, Nadia Bozak, Selmin Kara, Sheldon Lu, Anil Narine, Cajetan Iheka, and plenty of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all that, it\u2019s still surprising to me that a volume like mine, of densely theoretical film philosophy mixed with film history and film exegesis, would be as highly cited as it is. I\u2019m guessing that the holistic approach the book takes to cinema \u2014 understanding cinema as a worldmaking endeavor that emblematizes something fundamental (sociopolitical, technological, economic, and ecological) about the twentieth century \u2014 is what has resonated with readers. My ambition in Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/em> was to tap into all the above fields, alongside their relevant philosophical sources \u2014 phenomenology, Peircian semiotics, process philosophy, and various critical theories, et al. \u2014 in order to create a multi-dimensional ecophilosophy (and ecopolitics) of cinema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has it peaked?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My worry, however, is that ecocinema studies may have already peaked in its growth \u2014 not because people aren\u2019t writing on, about, and with it, but because, with the transition into digitality, cinema itself has peaked. We still watch movies, but they are ever more folded into our experience of digital media, which is ever more interactive, fragmented yet discontinuously connected (as I argue in The New Lives of Images<\/a><\/em>), algorithmicized, gamified, and so on. Perhaps that’s one reason why “ecomedia” has caught up to and overtaken “ecocinema” in the citation race, despite its slightly later start. (To be fair, Sean Cubitt’s book Eco Media<\/a><\/em> introduced that term back in 2005, though it didn’t get taken up as quickly. Given its purview and prescience, that book could be considered one of the first books of both ecomedia studies and<\/em> ecocinema studies.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the metaphors I worked with in Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/em> was that of cinema as a \u201cstalker\u201d of the world \u2014 Tarkovsky\u2019s film Stalker<\/em> served as a kind of template for my film-philosophy \u2014 but also of cinema viewers as \u201cthe stalked,\u201d \u201chaunted by the Zone [of cinema], by its ambiguous allure, its lore, its promise of possibilities for change and newness in the world.\u201d An ecophilosophical cinema, I proposed at the book\u2019s conclusion, would be a cinema \u201cstalked by the Earth and the cosmos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With digital media and now AI, I fear we are becoming stalked in a different way \u2014 stalked by our digital doppelg\u00e4nger<\/em>, whose promise of possibilities will be little more than a regurgitated mush of its training data fed back into itself repeatedly. Those aren\u2019t the only possibilities of \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d \u2014 both the Earth and the cosmos remain accessible in the digital era, and there are artists and theorists working to make those connections much more palpable. But it\u2019s the regurgitated images that are being offered to us most eagerly and effectively, in banal but addictively engaging forms, and the offer always comes with the unstated contract that we become more plugged into them, more dependent on them, offloading our cognitive skills to the mysterious workings of machine intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The task of formulating an ecophilosophy of AI is therefore an urgent one. At this point such an ecophilosophy would primarily be critical, an ecophilosophy against<\/em> AI, or at least against its currently dominant trajectory. But more importantly it would be an ecophilosophy and ecopolitics for alternative forms of intelligence, some of which are human, many of which are organismic, and most of which are relational and more-than<\/em>-artificial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings up the question of whether the catchy term “more-than-human,” which some ecocritics apply not only to biological others (which I critiqued here<\/a>) but also to artificial, machinic others, should be as inclusive as that, or if the mechanical and digital others — chatbots, robots, and the whole networked assemblage of them (up to AGI) — should still be considered less<\/em>-than-human, since they are artificial creations of humans operating with specific, culturally and historically derived (and limited) understandings of what intelligence is and isn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They remain other-than-human, with potentials we can’t predict. But let’s not blur the line entirely between things created by techno-enthusiasts and things whose evolutionary emergence arises from entirely different lines than our own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that sense, I suspect that ecocinema<\/em> studies will go on as a subset of ecomedia<\/em> studies, and the latter will be where we take on AI and its machinic derivatives. (But then, given my allegiance to media+environment<\/a>, I would<\/em> say that, wouldn’t I?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Is AI the new Planet Melancholia? <\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Note: This article was modified at 11:03 p.m. PST <\/em>on June 11 <\/em>by the addition of a paragraph, third last in the first section, to clarify a potential confusion about what constitutes ecocinema studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five hundred scholarly citations is not a lot in some fields (Thomas Kuhn\u2019s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been cited at least 167,000 times). But it\u2019s exciting to learn that my 2013 book Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature passed the 500 citation mark in Google Scholar, at some point recently. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,689701],"tags":[628627,58902,25195,711293],"class_list":["post-14491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-media_ecology","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-ecocinema-studies","tag-ecomedia-studies","tag-stalking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-3LJ","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5071,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/07\/22\/moving-environments-affect-emotion-ecocinema-live-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":14491,"position":0},"title":"Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, & Ecocinema (live blog?)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm in Munich at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t M\u00fcnchen), 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8049,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/03\/09\/appearances\/","url_meta":{"origin":14491,"position":1},"title":"Appearances","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of Graham Harman's recent book\u00a0Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, has been published online in the journal\u00a0Global Discourse. It's part of a book review symposium, which will be accompanied (in the print issue) by the author's reply to his\u00a0interlocutors. The journal has been publishing a lot on Latour's political\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8235,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/05\/05\/speculative-ecologies-of-postcinema-talk\/","url_meta":{"origin":14491,"position":2},"title":"“Speculative Ecologies of (Post)Cinema” talk","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 5, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"The video of my talk on \"Speculative Ecologies of (Post)Cinema: Cinema In and Beyond the Capitalocene,\" is now\u00a0up on Vimeo and at Shane Denson's web site. It is\u00a0from the SCMS panel \"Post-Cinema and\/as Speculative Media Theory,\" featuring Steven Shaviro,\u00a0Patricia Pisters, and Mark Hansen. I discuss the archive, the cloud, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/23\/cinema-ecology-the-death-of-carbon-capitalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":14491,"position":3},"title":"Cinema, ecology, & the death of carbon capitalism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 23, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Rice University's\u00a0Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences\u00a0(CENHS) has made my Cultures of Energy talk available on their YouTube channel. It's a longer version of the material I presented\u00a0at the SCMS \"Post-Cinema\" panel. Here's the abstract: This paper thinks through the intersections of three developments: (1) the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/25_cwFE2vKI\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10285,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/11\/26\/mediaenvironment-has-launched\/","url_meta":{"origin":14491,"position":4},"title":"Media+Environment has launched","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 26, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Media+Environment, the new, open access, online, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research published by the University of California Press, has launched its first issue and thematic stream, on \"The States of Media+Environment.\" The introduction can be read here. Articles can be accessed here. Articles include: Alenda Chang, Adrian\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8714,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/04\/11\/post-cinema\/","url_meta":{"origin":14491,"position":5},"title":"Post-Cinema","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"At long last, Shane Denson's and Julia Leyda's anthology Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film has come out in Catherine Grant's Reframe Books\u00a0open-access series. This mammoth\u00a0anthology features some of the leading theorists of our cinematic\/media moment including Lev Manovich, Steven Shaviro, Richard Grusin, Vivian Sobchack, Francesco Casetti, Patricia Pisters, Mark Hansen, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Post_cinema_cover_NEW","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2016\/04\/Post_cinema_cover_NEW-194x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14491"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14510,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14491\/revisions\/14510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}