(My first post on ecomediastudies – and thanks to Stephen for setting it up – the ending of a paper submitted to a special issue of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal devoted to Cameron’s movie: if I was re-writing, there would have to be some reflection on the relation between ecoptopia and the descent into the Mariana Trench)
Love is irreducibly melded with any vision of utopia, but here that utopian union is tinged with the sense of separation, in terms of both the human-avatar relation (Jake’s non-identity as Na’vi avatar and consequent absence from the scene of his own lovemaking) and the terminal separation of death. These separations are consistently coloured, in the tonality of the image and the orchestral colours of the soundtrack, with the warmth of nostalgia for a future that has yet to happen. This is perhaps the most conflicted region of the film’s utopian possibilities: love’s utopia is, it seems, always in the past.
This is too often the case with ecotopias more generally: once there was wilderness, and once we lived in harmony with nature, but now no more, whether the voice lamenting is that of Heidegger lamenting the enframing of the world or that of deep ecologists yearning for return. Avatar plays out this orientation towards the past as an ending, told in voiceover by one who has already lived it, like a film noir. This is perhaps the moment of greatest betrayal: to have raised the spectre of utopia, not only as wish-fulfilment but as the not-yet outcome of a still evolving condition, the situation of network societies and their potential, and to have placed it not in the unknowable future but in the already-over. Avatar’s saving grace is that the aporias of animation interrupt this totalizing orientation. The non-identity of the image in gaps between layers, incomplete transformations, and even narrative contradictions between the human and the animated prise open little chinks of light, possibilities of being otherwise. ‘Avatar blues’ is a symptom not of the failure of cinema but the failure of reality, of the social, and of the rift between the social and our land, between tools and knowledge. There is the grievous realization that the paradise on the church wall is only paint, but there is too the realization that the paint on the wall is a foreshadowing of something other and better, and the animation of this paradise is both as paper-thin and as rich.
See the full version of Nicole Starosielksi’s essay “Subaquatic Frames” at FlowTV
Excerpt:
This essay tracks the origins of the cinematic framing of undersea environments in order to draw attention to the historical specificity of this view...
Here, I chart how early popular underwater film envisioned the ocean, not as a place to escape earthly concerns, but as a territory to be exploited, an area of contestation and battle, and a zone imbricated in the interactions of white explorers with coastal islanders. The sea was not a site to be communed with, but one that was inhabited by racialized (and often dangerous) others. It was not until the 1960s that American film and television “whitewashed†the ocean, erasing indigenous peoples from the narratives and depicting it as a region beyond territorial concerns. It was at this point that the undersea environment became a safe place for a middle class American family to explore and to reconcile their internal differences.
…
With the transition to a domesticated ocean, undersea film and television sidelined the coastal politics and conflicts that had permeated many of the previous films. Underwater environments became a natural landscape that could be inhabited by an American family. They were no longer the domain of coastal peoples, but a “blank†without history. It is in the undersea film and television of the 1960s that the contemporary view of the ocean originated: a site where we could move beyond social differences and explore our interconnections with others via a shared gaze out onto the subaquatic world.
A longer version of this essay is forthcoming in Ecocinema Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2012). Thanks to Meredith Bak for comments on this version of the article.
John’s recent post on the collection Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media and he and Andy Hageman‘s previous posts on new media technologies have had me keeping my eyes open for the discursive and ideological relationship between media ecology and ecocriticism.
On of the places I have seen this connection playing out textually is in Robert Harris’s new fictional thriller novel The Fear Index. As he explains in the interview with PBS Newshour embedded below, Harris has once again discovered that something he thought fictional was in fact already happening. In the novel, a group of hedge fund managers create an algorithm that searches the web for fear-based words in order to generate successful hedges. The algorithm becomes unstable by assuming higher levels of risk with each hedge until it collapses the market. In real life, Harris discovered that a similar approach is already in play at a number of trading agencies. Using algorithms (if a then b or c, if b then d, if c then e, etc), a small group of agencies are conducing trades at rates so fast they are timed in microseconds. According to reporter Paul Solman, “The algorithms are actually the brainchildren of top-flight physicists, forced to migrate to Wall Street in the early ’90s, when Congress killed the 54-mile-in-circumference supercollider, for which land outside Dallas was already excavated.” According to Harris, who believed he had made this kind of trading up until watching the DOW suddenly drop 300 points while watching business coverage of the Greek debt crisis, his novel explores the idea that “we are the victims of some sort of gigantic H.G. Wells-like science fiction creation, which is the markets, so huge in the — in the numbers of shares and the vast values of transactions every day, so fast with the speed, that it has somehow slipped the control of human beings, and almost is itself a kind of Frankenstein’s monster run amok in the world.”
Market as monster, algorithm as economics; when one considers the ecological relationship between the markets and the “natural resources” used to create the commodity flow necessary to “grow” the economy, one of the central nodes at which ecocriticism and media ecology seems to converge in the space of the new media technologies necessary for algorithmic trading, in the televisual flow that offers 24 coverage of the markets, and in the broader anthropocentric cultural/political logic which allows the markets to exist as they do.
Watch Fictional Thriller Tackles Dangers of High-Frequency Trading on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
A couple days ago, the public radio program This American Life ran a full episode retraction of an interview with writer Mike Davies that originally aired in January of this year. Davies story had gone viral and become the most downloaded episode ever of the long-run show.
At issue are claims Davies made about a visit to China and visit to a factory making iPods and iPhones. Apparently, while Davies’ broad claims about factory conditions at Apple plants are accurate, his story stretched the truth on numerous occasions and included such blatant lies as a claim that factory guards carry guns.
“To get a sense of what really is true of Apple’s working conditions in China, Ira talks to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg. Duhigg, along with Times reporter David Barboza, wrote the newspaper’s front-page investigative series in early 2012 about this subject. And while Duhigg won’t tell you how to feel about Apple and its supplier factories’ practices, he does lay out the options for how you could feel, in a very clear and logical way. Duhigg is also the author of The Power of Habit.”
What I am concerned about, however, is the fact that host Ira Glass justifies the fact that Apple workers regularly work over 60 hours/week because they are young and demand overtime.  Essentially, Glass takes the position that he is not going to “feel bad” or responsible for such conditions and while I understand the complexity of the issue I sensed that his commentary during the show could have been delivered by an executive from Apple.
Though I appreciate what This American Life has gone through to air this retraction, I am deeply disappointed that the show did not take this opportunity to do more to explain the environmental aspect of new media production nor connect the worker’s rights issue to the broader concerns of environmental justice. This feels like missed opportunity to make a stronger point rather than simply an apology.
Contemporary interest in the environment is based on highly mediated representation of its most appealing aspects and today’s symbolism is drawn from popular culture” (Bagust).
This post is to announce a recently published collection that I contributed to called Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology, edited by Sid Dobrin (part of the Routledge series in Rhetoric and Communication). You can preview the book fairly extensively on Amazon:Â http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415897041/ref=rdr_ext_sb_ti_hist_1
In general, the collection’s engagement with ecology is perhaps closer to work in media ecology than it is to ecocriticism or other approaches that emphasize environmental(ist) themes across various media. In other words, you won’t find much discussion on representations of nature or environmental politics, though a couple chapters deal with specific environmental disasters and institutional/university rhetorics of sustainability. By and large, the collective aim is to incorporate concepts and methodologies from ecological theory (as well as systems theory and complexity theory), in an effort to account for writing — particularly its circulation across new media platforms — as a complex, ecological phenomenon.
A one-day symposium hosted by the Film Studies programme at the University of Surrey
Friday September 14, 2012
The third in the series ‘Documentary and …’ to be held at the University of Surrey will be on Documentary and the Environment. The ‘Documentary and …’ series seeks to explore the conjunction of the documentary project with the worlds it encounters and the practical and conceptual modifications these combinations bring.
The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen a consistent flow of environmental documentary films which have managed to gain attention beyond special interest groups. This one-day event aims to explore the emergence or perhaps resurgence of this documentary subgenre. How have documentary filmmakers worked with the concepts of the environment and environmental awareness? What are the ethics and aesthetics of environmental documentary filmmaking? How do theories of documentary, ecology, and the theorisation of environmental politics interact? How do audiences respond to environmental documentaries?
We invite speakers and contributors working on documentary film and non-fiction media as well as on the intersection of documentary with environmental education, environmental communication, and environmental psychology to respond to these questions. The following topics are a guideline to potential paper proposals and are not meant to exclude other interpretations of the seminar’s title Documentary and the Environment:
- Defining the eco-doc: experimental, documentary and activist representations of environmental issues
- Place, space and ecology in environmental documentary
- Environmental justice and the documentary
- Nature and the natural in environmental documentary
- Wildlife documentary and environmental issues
- The history of the environmental documentary
- Support structures for the production and distribution of environmental documentaries
- The evolving environmental film festival circuit and the social hub
- The sustainability of documentary filmmaking
Please submit a proposal including a 300-word paper abstract and a short biography to Dr. Helen Hughes (h.hughes@surrey.ac.uk) by Friday 29, June 2012.
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 Philosophyâ€
University of Cyprus, Nicosia, July 2 – 6, 2012
THEME OF THE WORKSHOP
Environmental issues are typically framed within public discourse as problems that require empirical information and technological solutions. This paradigm holds not only scientific but also philosophical assumptions, most importantly that the real world is the one described by natural science, the world of scientific realism. In this worldview, all other disciplines (such as ethics, the qualitative social sciences, and politics and policy) are assimilated as “tools in the toolbox†used to solve the problems previously defined by Western science. The intensity of current environmental crises—especially global climate destabilization—energizes this focus on practical problem-solving and on technological and policy solutions within existing institutional, economic, and political frameworks. However, this approach fails to recognize that the humanistic disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and the arts, both construct and express knowledge of nature that exceeds the bounds of problem-solving and the ontology of scientific realism. Further, claims about nature that appeal to the authority of Western science, though masked as objective, are frequently deployed to undergird ideological constructions about race, class, gender, and nation; the authority to make claims about nature is inseparable from political power.
Underlying this default position of the natural sciences is the unexamined assumption that environmental problems are encountered independently of any context, values, history, or disciplinary biases. Humanities scholars in the emerging fields of ecocriticism, environmental art, environmental philosophy, and related areas of inquiry vigorously challenge this assumption, arguing that our environmental problems are inescapably ethical, historical, and political. The very definitions of environmental problems at any given moment are a function of human ideas and negotiations that have a particular cultural location and history and that reflect specific concepts of ethical responsibility and justice. Consequently, the methods of the natural sciences, although necessary for meeting our environmental challenges, cannot replace the interpretive, critical, and artistic methods of the humanities. The emergence of the “environmental humanities,†as a multidisciplinary site of convergence within academic scholarship, responds to this need.
This workshop will engage with the emerging disciplines of the environmental humanities to pose a series of questions, including:
How are the methods and epistemology of the humanities distinct from those of the empirical sciences?
What would a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to questions of the environment look like, and how can this be negotiated within current institutional limitations?
What impact can the humanities have on public discourse and political will in specific areas, such as environmental justice and climate change?
PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS
Please submit two-page abstracts by email in Word format to the workshop organizers by 15 March 2012. Each presenter will have 20 minutes and is asked to present rather than read a paper. Abstracts of accepted presentations will be circulated to the participants in advance of the conference.
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Final versions of the papers (not to exceed 3,000 words, or 10 double-spaced pages, including notes) will be reviewed by the workshop organizers for possible publication in the conference proceedings.
THE CONFERENCE
This workshop is planned under the auspices of the 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, on the theme “The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘The Three Narratives’—Art, Science, and Philosophy.†For more information, visit ISSEI’s website at http://issei2012.haifa.ac.il/
THE VENUE
The workshop will be held at the University of Cyprus – Main Campus, Kallipoleos Avenue 75, Nicosia 2100 Cyprus.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Janet Fiskio
Environmental Studies
Oberlin College
jfiskio@oberlin.edu
Ted Toadvine
Philosophy and Environmental Studies
University of Oregon.
toadvine@uoregon.edu