The 2013 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference will be held in Lawrence, Kansas May 29-June 2. To get folks excited about the growth of ecomedia studies we’ll be posting paper and panel abstracts as they become available (so start sending them in!). Since registration for the Pre-Conference Seminars (May 28) is now open here’s one that looks to be of interest.
NOTE: The registration deadline has passed but a few slots are still available as of April 3.
Ecocriticism, Data, and Digital Media
Complete description: http://asle.ku.edu/Preconference/houser-ulman.php
Registration detais: http://asle.ku.edu/Preconference/index.php
Description and Goals
From information visualizations to interactive databases, digital media have become central to environmental culture over the last few decades. This seminar will investigate how familiar environmental discourses (from non-fiction narratives of travel, adventure, and inhabitation to experimental poetry; from political argument to natural history) are adapting modes of representation grounded in the sciences and information technology. Of particular interest will be how contemporary art contributes to environmental debates about issues such as biodiversity, climate change, and pollution by using data- and code-based representational forms such as GIS mapping technologies, interactive Web sites, information visualizations, and databases. This seminar invites participants to assess how cultural producers are using such strategies to address environmental issues and to alter how we perceive and live in the world. We will also consider how environmentalism and ecocriticism stand to benefit from engaging these technologies and what may be lost in doing so.
Format
Participants will write short position papers/media presentations (~5 minutes) that address or build off of the collaborative inquiry questions listed below, then circulate their papers/presentations about two weeks before the conference, with the option of including short readings and/or links to media projects that inspired their positions. Before the seminar, participants will read one another’s materials and the common readings listed below.
At the seminar, participants will introduce their papers/presentations for no more than 5 minutes each, after which the group will respond. Prior to the seminar, the organizers will create topical clusters for the presentations and discussions.
In addition to discussing one another’s papers/presentations, participants will collaboratively plan a media presentation (e.g., Web page, seminar Tumblr, or other format) to be completed after the conference and shared with the ASLE community.
Collaborative Inquiry Questions
How do contemporary environmental discourses of materiality, embodiment, and reality engage with discourses of “digital” spaces and “virtual” and “augmented” reality?
How do depictions of physical environments and processes employ the representational strategies of digital media (i.e. code, data visualization, and so on)?
How do artworks adapt representational strategies from the empirical sciences in order to convey environmental knowledge to the public?
What cognitive skills and forms of authority do different environmental media privilege?
Do data- and code-based representations and works of art require different interpretational procedures than those ecocriticism has traditionally privileged?
Suggested Readings
Anderson, Alison. Media, Culture, and the Environment. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print.
Boetzkes, Amanda. The Ethics of Earth Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Print.
Cubitt, Sean. Ecomedia: Theory, Culture & Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. Print.
Heise, Ursula K. “Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction.” Configurations 18 (2011): 39-62. Web.
Mitchell, W. J. T., and Mark B. N. Hansen. Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print.
Ulman, H. Lewis. “Beyond Nature/Writing: Virtual Landscapes Online, in Print, and in Real Life.” Beyond Nature Writing. Eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. 341–356.
A selection of online images, databases, and web-based art projects (e.g., Maya Lin’s What Is Missing?, Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers, Amy Young’s digital media and biological art, Google “Sea View”).
Organizer Bios
Heather Houser is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current project offers an account of techniques of environmental description across media. Her first book, Eco-Sickness: Environment, Disease, and Affect in Contemporary Fiction, is under contract with Columbia University Press. It argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to environmental culture of the past three decades. Her essays have appeared in Contemporary Literature (2010), The American Book Review (2010), American Literature (2012), and The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012, eds. Cohen and Konstantinou).
H. Lewis Ulman, associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, has straddled the digital and physical environments throughout his thirty-year career in higher education, from writing a master’s thesis on American nature writing while learning to program mainframe computers to editing the ASLE Online Bibliography from 2000–2010. Along the way, he has written articles on non-fiction nature writing and virtual landscapes, and edited an online edition of previously unpublished eighteenth-century discourses on natural history. He is currently working on a book-length study of virtual landscapes and representations of virtual landscapes across multiple media.
I recently saw this 2011 Ted Talk by Nathalie Miebach and figured it would intrigue folks here.
Reposted from Ted.com
“Nathalie Miebach’s work focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. Her woven sculptures interpret scientific data related to astronomy, ecology and meteorology in three-dimensional space. Her pieces simulatneously function as works of art, aural embodiments of data (musical compositions) and instruments that illustrate environmental change.
By utilizing artistic processes and everyday materials, Miebach questions and expands the boundaries of traditional science data visualization — and provokes expectations of what visual vocabulary is considered to be in the domain of science and art. Miebach [was] a TEDGlobal 2011 Fellow.”
IN MEDIA RES
SPRING 2013 CALL FOR CURATORS
Environmental Media – April 22-26, 2013
 CALL: To coincide with Earth Day, this theme week focuses on the representation of environmental issues in the media. Since 1970, the first Earth Day holiday, environmental activism has come to include an increasing number of issues like clean air, endangered species, and clean water. We encourage proposals that have equally diverse approaches to the environment and media.
Possible topics include:
- News coverage of environmental policy
- Social networking and environmental activism
- NBC Universal’s “Green is Universal” campaign
- Local/sustainable food culture
We welcome discussion of any of these questions or any other that arise around the topic.
Proposals may be brief, but do be sure to describe the topic and key question(s) to be explored. Please submit your proposal by March 11. If interested, please contact In Media Res (inmediares.gsu@gmail.com) with topic proposals or for more information about the theme. Be sure to include the name of the theme week you would like to be involved with in the subject line of the email.
Academics, journalists, critics, media professionals and fans are all welcome to submit proposals.
The actual piece will include either a 30-second to 3-minute clip, an image, or a slideshow that will be accompanied by a 300 to 350 word response to/contextualization of your clip, image, or slideshow. In addition to the your piece, you will be expected to engage the other pieces presented that week to encourage discussion and further flesh out the individual topic in relation to the week’s theme.
As I’ve written in previous posts, Portland, Oregon is home to a burgeoning market for film and media production. One company that is currently on the cutting edge of data visualization technologies is Second Story Interactive Media, whose company motto is “Elevating the Art of Storytelling.” Second Story was founded in 1994 by artist Julie Beeler and interactive media specialist Brad Johnson. During its brief history, the company has designed stand-alone kiosks, online multimedia, interactive installations, mobile and tablet apps, and “digital/analog blurred reality.”
Second Story’s work can be seen around the US. For example, they have just completed work on combined multimedia installation/website centerpiece entitled “The Emerging Issues Commons” for the North Carolina State University Institute for Emerging Issues. The goal of the project is to bring such issues as education, economics, health, and environment into a single space for shared conversation. Users both at the installation and on the web can find information and visualizations of such issues as increasing access to higher education in rural areas, preparing a workforce to meet the challenges of next generation manufacturing, and developing a built infrastructure that maintains environmental sustainability.
Another of Second Story’s recent projects is the Ecological Urbanism App, which they designed in 2012 for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and have made available to the public at the Apple store. Not simply and ebook, “this iPad app visualizes the growing body of discourse surrounding the design and management of cities. . . . A timely evolution of the book, this iPad app visualizes the growing body of discourse surrounding the design and management of cities.”
For the Portland musical ensemble Third Angle, Second Story designed what they have described as, “a raw industrial space, transformed into an immersive underwater world through giant video projections,” in 2005 to serve “as an environmental backdrop to a contemporary music performance.”
To be sure, not all of Second Story’s projects are ecologically-themed, such as their installations for Nike and Coca Cola. I am hoping to take University of Oregon Cinema Studies Students on a tour of Second Story’s Portland studios in April or May and will be sure to ask them detailed questions about their own sustainability efforts to reduce the ecological footprint of their media projects. Look for a follow-up after that visit.
I’m curious if others have seen Robert Parson’s 2011 film General Orders No. 9, which I had a chance to see recently on Netflix. From the poster and title you would not know what it was about without reading the description.
Parson’s film is an experimental documentary that combines poetry and images of Georgia to express the director’s impressions of industrialization and environmental injustice. There is no narrative but a sense of direction and theme is established by Parson’s combination of sound and image. He is highly skeptical of cities, interstate highways, and all things modern (perhaps with the exception of the camera itself). As I tell my students, narrative film wants us to feel something, documentary to think something, and experimental film to perceive something. And perception, or reorienting of perception, is clearly Parson’s goal. I was definitely put in mind of the kind of ecocinema experience Scott MacDonald and Paula Willoquet-Maricondi have described in their work in the field. It is an ambitious first film and well worth viewing to provoke further conversation. Here’s a link to a thoughtful review by Studio 360’s David Krasnow. I’ll be interested at the upcoming ASLE conference in June to hear if anyone is thinking or writing about the film.
The University of Nebraska Press has recently announced the launch of a Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. The first issue will be published Fall 2013. Presently, the editors are looking for short statements on the word ‘resilience’ from environmental humanities scholars. This looks like another great venue for ecomedia scholars. Here is the overview from the journal website:
“The emerging sustainability initiatives developing on university and college campuses worldwide and the increasing focus on environmentalism in various scientific disciplines often fail to converse with scholars in the humanities. Yet the past five years have seen the birth of a vibrant interdisciplinary field, the environmental humanities. Scholars of the environmental humanities engage with the natural and social sciences, whose expertise is crucial in addressing current planetary crises such as global climate change. Yet the expertise of the sciences in diagnosing environmental problems has not, as of yet, translated into a coherent vision of sustainability. The focus on narrative skill, critical thinking, historicity, culture, aesthetics and ethics central to the humanities and to humanistic social sciences provides a crucial research complement to the endeavors of scientists. The ecological value of humanities scholarship has never been more clear. Resilience aims to place the environmental humanities at the center of conversations about our ecological futures. We aim to invite a broad agenda for academic humanists interested in the sustainability project and to create a venue where the humanities can reach a diverse academic audience and contribute to larger shifts in perception of what resilience is and can be.”
Students and faculty at the University of Vermont are making outstanding strides in the field of ecological media studies. Recently, students in Adrian Ivakhiv’s “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics” course have started a new blog called e²mc: evolving ecological media culture(s). Ivahkiv, a contributor to this site and a leading scholar scholar in the field (whose own research blog Immancence is linked in our blogroll), hopes e²mc will be a major step toward the establishment of an Ecomedia Studies Lab to showcase the work being done across the UV campus where they are building a “critical mass” of faculty and students interested in studying media and/as ecology.
Below is an excerpt from the e²mc “About Us” page:
“We live in a different world than did previous generations of humanity. Billions of humans can access a vast ocean of information at their fingertips. Digital media have helped construct a sphere of thickly networked, hypermediate, and interactive communication links that span all levels of human society around the globe.
How do these new media environments affect and interact with the social and biophysical environments that preceded them, and that continue to undergird them?
…
e2mc seeks to explore the relationships between media and ecologies: material, social, and perceptual ecologies within which mediations play an increasingly powerful, complex, and transformative role. It is devoted to the idea of “evolving ecological media cultureâ€: an evolution of a media culture that is cognizant of its multiple ecological contours and connections.
e2mc begins as an experiment, a class exercise for ENVS 204 “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics,†a senior undergraduate class at the University of Vermont. But it will not limit itself to traditional pedagogical constraints. Where it leads we will see. We invite any and all to share in the adventure.”
Here in Oregon, the Annual Governor’s Meeting on Film and Video was recently held in Portland, which is quickly becoming a hub of media activity thanks to the dedicated efforts of independent filmmakers, the success of Laika Animation Studio films like Coraline and ParaNorman, and current television productions Grimm, Portlandia, and Leverage (which has just finished shooting on its final season).
According to the Governor’s Office of Film and Television, the average amount spent on production in Oregon each year has risen from $7 million to $100 million. This amount is expected to surpass $120 million next year as tax credits and other incentives draw production away from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles to the relatively more laid back atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest.
With this change, the Office of Film and Television has gone out of its way to promote sustainable production practices and has included a link to a Green Production Guide on their website. At the meeting, Oregon’s First Lady Cylvia Hayes took the stage and delivered a well-received presentation on Grimm‘s efforts to use blended biodiesel for their fleet, Leverage‘s use of sustainably harvested wood for set construction, and Portlandia‘s decision to hire a “master recycler” to oversee on-set sustainability. Though the state still has a long way to go to make productions carbon neutral, these initial steps are very encouraging as Oregon seeks to promote itself as a new destination for green film and video production.