e²mc

evolving ecological media culture(s)

October 24, 2020
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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The pre-election media vortex

I haven’t followed up on the last post here on e2mc for the simple reason that the blog has hardly any followers right now (it’s been largely inactive since I used it alongside my film/media course in 2013). But since the course I mentioned in that post, Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics, is now in full swing, and since we’re dealing with all manner of exciting topics — including media coverage of the election, the pandemic, racial justice protests, and big tech lawsuits and controversies — it’s a good time to share some of my thinking more publicly (and that of the students’ if they care to join in).

Here’s something that combines a couple of posts I shared with the class over the last week or so.

Our topic these two weeks has been media disinformation and polarization, with a nod toward conspiracy theories. Among other things, we have been reading the Pew Research Center’s report on “U. S. Media Polarization & the 2020 Election,” Claire Wardle’s/First Draft’s “Essential Guide to Understanding Information Disorder” (which is a distillation of the much more detailed Information Disorder report), and Adrienne LaFrance’s “The prophecies of Q” from the Atlantic monthly’s “Shadowland” series on conspiracy theories in the United States. This follows our reading of parts of the book Network Propaganda (which we are finishing up this coming week).

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August 27, 2020
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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Media Ecologies & Cultural Politics, the 2020 pandemic/election version

This space will soon become a supplementary space — a kind of “annex” — for sharing things related to the Fall 2020 University of Vermont class “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.” The previous version of the course was taught in 2013, with public sharing of reading information, videos, and conversation taking place here on this blog. You can read those old posts by starting with Week 1 and following through the “Next post –>” link found toward the bottom-right of each page, below the comment field.

A lot has happened since 2013. This year’s version of the course will naturally focus on the cultural politics of media in this time and place, dominated as it is by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the looming November U.S. elections, and the crisis of race and social justice in this country.

In 2013, the course was a Senior level seminar; this year it is a junior/intermediate level class. It is also, for the first time, a fully remote/online course. Most course materials and discussions will be shared and/or unfold in a pay-walled part of the Blackboard course platform, and it’s not clear yet how much will take place in the public space of this blog. However, my hope is that some, and perhaps even all, of our critical analysis projects and applied media projects will be shared here publicly.

At any rate, public input will be welcome. A brief course description is available here. A syllabus can be read here.

November 18, 2015
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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Eco Lit, Arts & Media

I’m currently teaching an intermediate-level undergraduate course called “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media,” or “ELAM” for short. The class covers many styles and formats of literature, arts (including music), and media work that engage in various ways with environmentally/ecologically oriented thematics and practices. The course syllabus is here. An early version of its themes is here.

Students engage in a series of activities which, aside from readings and discussions, include a creative arts project (which can make use of any artistic medium, from literary to visual to performative to digital) and profiles of environmentally oriented artists, musicians, writers, film and media makers, and art works.

We are currently discussing whether to share some of those materials here. Stay tuned.

 

June 12, 2015
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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The cosmopolitics of Herzog’s bears

One of the films that gets a lengthy treatment in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image is Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, about the death of Timothy Treadwell at the hands of a brown bear in Alaska. I characterized it there as a complex and nuanced film that provides a series of somewhat contradictory — but cognitively and affectively compelling — approaches to the human-animal boundary.

What I neglected to examine in any depth was Herzog’s nod to the Alutiiq Native population to help make his own case about that boundary. I should have done that. A film about relations between humans and bears in a part of the world where such relations have existed for centuries requires delving into what Latour and Stengers would call their “cosmopolitics” — the ways in which they have been shaped and continue to affect divergent forms of “naturecultural” coexistence beyond the “modern constitution” of Euro-American modes of thought and practice. 

Filmmaker (and UVM graduate student) Finn Yarbrough took up this issue in a short paper for the course I’ve just finished teaching. The paper ranges insightfully from the film’s queerish gender subtext to Alutiiq shamanism. I’m sharing that paper as a guest post below, with Finn’s permission.   — A.I.

https://youtu.be/yySvdJeBcEg

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January 17, 2014
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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Ecomedia playlist

I’ve begun a YouTube playlist entitled “Ecomedia,” where I’ll be sharing ecologically relevant PSAs, eco-art videos, and other works relevant to the broad and loose category encompassed by its title.

Access it here.

Feel free to “like” it, subscribe to it, and send suggestions to me about videos that should be added to the list. 

Note that simply typing in “ecomedia” in a YouTube search won’t get you to it — it’ll take you instead to the commercial CBS Ecomedia site (or one of its many ads).

 

 

November 13, 2013
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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Eco-trauma & the eco-image

These are further notes on Chapter 6 of EMI…

1. Trauma and the eco-image

One of the themes of this chapter is the connection between films about ecological disaster — real, imagined, or potential (future disaster) — and films about other forms of cultural or historical trauma.

How can film represent traumatic events? What if the trauma is as fundamental and collective as the end of the conditions of life as we know it, which is what happens in devastating disasters? What if the events have not yet taken place, but are only imagined as a possibility on the horizon? Continue Reading →

November 2, 2013
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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Mappings, becomings, eco-trauma & the Real

The second week of the animality and “biomorphism” chapter (chapter 5) moved us into an exploration of human-animal interactions and human “becomings-animal.” A screening of Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” (discussed extensively in the chapter) was supplemented by bits and pieces from “Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” Robinson Devor’s unusual documentary “Zoo” (which you can watch in full here), and several others.

Now we move into the home stretch of the course. Chapter 6 is intended as the culmination of the book’s several strands, so it would be useful to recap things as we move into it. The first section of the chapter does just that for the main theoretical apparatus of the book (notably, the three “morphisms” and the three moments of the film experience). Beyond that, however, are the various mappings provided in the preceding three chapters.

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October 23, 2013
by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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Biomorphism (EMI chapter 5)

This week we’ve moved on to the topic of “biomorphism,” which refers to the dimension of life and sensuous interactivity in a film-world – the liveliness that’s found between the passivity of the object-world (the geomorphic) and the human activity of the subject-world (anthropomorphism).

Here is where a film depicts objects as alive, or animals as social, like us, or humans as animal-like. I’ve argued that this is where everything ultimately happens – in the action and interaction between sensorial bodies, things that can perceive and respond to other things. The geomorphic and the anthropomorphic are two ends of the continuum that stretches across the biomorphic field of possibilities.

But since we’ve already dealt with nonliving things (chapter 3) and with humans (chapter 4), we’re focusing here on living, animate things – or what film depicts as living, animate things. Nature films, wildlife documentaries, animation, horror and monster movies, and certain kinds of science-fiction are the genres that most commonly engage this biomorphic realm in the most interesting ways.

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