Ecomedia

Mother earth tied to the train tracks: The scriptive implications of melodrama in climate change discourse abSTracT This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) as paradigmatic. It engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse and expands on that scholarship by introducing a performance studies methodology to examine how melodrama offers the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The essay examines the tropes of melodrama – which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action – in order to analyse their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change. This essay engages in close readings of performances struc-tured by generic scriptive discourse to argue that, for climate change activists, the forms that environmental narratives take, may communicate as much as the content of those narratives.

The Anthropocene is being suggested as a new geological age replacing the Holocene and is a description of a time interval where significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activity. Artists interested in the earth sciences are using digital media to provide audiences with ways of understanding the issues highlighted in discussions about the Anthropocene. These artists are harnessing data through visualisation and sonification, facilitating audience participation, and are often working in art-science collaborations. These activities demonstrate a transdisciplinary approach that is necessary for confronting the world's most pressing problems, such as climate change. After a discussion of the opportunities provided by visualisation technologies and an overview of the Anthropocene, this chapter explores the following interrelated themes through examples of creative works: (1) nanoscale, (2) geology and deep time, (3) climate, weather, and the atmosphere, (4) extreme places – beyond wilderness, and (5) curatorial practice as environmental care.

An examination of how environments are represented across media forms and how they mediate cultural practices. Media forms include landscape painting, nature photography, art installations, music, video games, science fiction, comics, podcasts, and eco-cinema. Cultural practices include romantic, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions, engaging with indigeneities, nationalism, environmentalism, settler colonialism, and warfare. The following ideas are braided through the course: the Environment in Media (or aesthetic framing of "nature"), Media for the Environment (such as advocacy for preservation), Environment as Media (found forms as vessels of meaning), and Media as Environment (immersion, etc.).

As connected platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok rise in popular use, communication strategies are forced to grow more condensed and to be transmitted primarily across digital screens. Online short-form video has consequently become a primary format for environmental communication, though research on digital communication remains largely limited to frame analysis and discussions of print and still images. Filling a need in current scholarship on environmental media and aiming to further bridge humanities and communication research, this article offers a model for assessing environmentally themed short-form videos that complements communication studies' focus on messaging rhetoric with humanities-based film and visual culture analytic tools for assessing the connotative aspect of aesthetic and narrative elements. Intending to offer an applicable framework for environmental messengers, we develop a genre system of short-form videos along cognitive and emotional axes that can be quantitatively identified according to formal practices, demonstrated through an examination of four environmental short-form videos.

Ecomedia is an emerging framework that views all media technologies and communications as embedded within a material and environmental reality.

Ecomedia Literacy offers a focused and practical guide to integrate the relationship between media and the environment—ecomedia—into media education. It enables media teachers to ‘green’ their pedagogy by providing essential tools and approaches that can be applied in the classroom.

Media are an essential feature of our planetary ecosystem emergency, contributing to both the problem and solution to climate chaos, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, water contamination, and so on. Offering a clear theoretical framework and suggested curriculum guide, Antonio Lopez provides key resources that will enable media educators to apply ecomedia concepts into their curricula. By reconceptualizing media education, this book connects ecology, environmental communication, ecomedia studies, environmental humanities, and ecoliteracy to bridge media literacy and education for sustainability.

Ecomedia Literacy is an essential read for educators and scholars in the areas of media literacy, media and communication, media and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and environmental studies.

Ecomedia Literacy is designed to be proactive, providing tools and approaches that can be applied in a variety of learning environments.

A practical guide for educators of media studies, cultural studies and digital humanities to incorporate ecomedia concepts into their curriculum and teaching methods.

Provides in-depth discussion of “ecomedia” (the relationship between media and environment).

Features a theoretical framework, curriculum structure, and lesson guides for specific activities and curriculum design.

Makes meaningful connections to develop a sense of purpose by synthesizing the domains of digital and living systems through an experiential approach to learning.

Promotes skills necessary for environmental challenges, include self-reflection, critical analysis, systems thinking, creativity, and visualization; and more traditional skills like literacy of media, information and technology.

Integrates concepts from education for sustainability, such as cultural preservation and transformation; responsible green citizenship; the dynamics of systems and change; sustainable economics; healthy commons natural laws and ecological principles; inventing and affecting the future; a sense of place.

Develops a theoretical approach that reimagines communication and media theories.

Explores an ecomedia literacy curriculum heuristic called the “ecomediasphere.”

Technology, it can be argued, creates "miracles." Who would believe that mountains could drift away, come closer into view, or even vanish? Because of modern extractive mechanisms as well as the use of cutting-edge gear today, we are witnessing this spectacle of removal. In the last two decades, Latin American cinema has brought a landscape of decapitated mountains into view. Mountains with no head, with their top chopped off, bold and bare, like the head of a Dominican friar. This violent landscape reproduces itself in various and multiple scenarios, from the Andes in Argentina to the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. I use the term decapitated acknowledging the ferocity of its meaning, but, more importantly, to directly address the violence embedded in the images of what Sunaura Taylor has defined as disabled ecologies: "the webs of disability that are created spatially, temporally, and across species boundaries when ecosystems are contaminated, depleted, and profoundly altered." 1 Decapitated mountains entail the violence of a spectacle: the degradation of magnificent landscapes, the curtail of living organisms. A visual spectacle that depicts how thousands of bodies (human and nonhuman alike) are wounded daily, and gratuitously, for no apparent reason except the ongoing machninery put into practice by the Capitalocene. 2 Specifically, I refer here to a well-known reason: coal, copper, gold, and silver. All of these precious commodities, except for coal, have an ongoing demand in the current markets of this globalized era. 3 Let's take, for example, 327

meteoGMT es una instalación interactiva multimedia, que se enmarca dentro de las prácticas artísticas llamadas ecomedia. Esta instalación reporta datos masivos meteorológicos de internet, transcodificando estéticamente esta información en un paisaje sonoro/lumínico, en donde una serie paraguas dispuestos a modo de matriz cuadrangular y otros elementos electrónicos se activarán, o no, dependiendo de los datos que le sean requeridos por el espectador mediante la interfaz gráfica de un dispositivo móvil.

ECOPIETY: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue -- coming in Fall 2019 from New York University Press. This book analyzes diverse representations of environmental moral engagement in contemporary mediated popular culture.  Taylor identifies and explores intertwining, co-constitutive, yet contrary, stories of what she terms “ecopiety” and “consumopiety” as they flow across multiple media platforms. How these stories compete and conflict, vying for space as contested narratives in the public imagination constitutes a central inquiry of the book. Drawing together theoretical insights from cultural studies, media studies, environmental humanities, and religious studies, Taylor offers a critical reading of primary source data drawn from such areas as the marketing of green consumer products, “greenwashed” corporate advertising, environmental mobile device applications, eco-themed reality television, the marketing of eco-funerals, Internet sharing of environmental tattoos, “green” fashion guides, and the media strategies of green hip-hop activism. Taylor makes the case that a detailed, multi-channel, cross-platform approach to cultural analysis is critical to understanding the kind of important “work” taking place as mediated popular culture plays an integral role in the “greening” of American moral sensibilities.  Ecopiety delves into the complex and contested processes of remaking our world and rescripting the future in the digital age—a time when storytelling processes themselves are shaping and being shaped by new media outlets and digital sharing technologies.

Big data and dataism can be considered as the emerging and renewed totalitarian ideology of neo-imperial capitalism. Within the contemporary economic and political production lines, human and nonhuman data is the capital of hegemonic power. On the other hand, administrators of corporate culture, such as Douglas Merill, Google’s former chief information officer and the founder of ZestFinance - a startup that leverages big data to provide credit scoring information note that they just don’t know how to use it yet. The problem seems to be located not only on innovating ways of mining exhaustive loads of data but also on making data ‘fertile’ for the sake of control through empirical and structural analysis.

The paper questions whether it would be possible to consider data and data analysis from a minor post-feminist perspective. It aims to present a critical perspective for big data. Considering data and data analysis as tools of precarious sustainability, ecomediatic data poses such questions: What is the nature of ‘infertile’ data that are excluded and expired within the dominant reasoning processing? If data and data analysis are becoming the ideological and hegemonic power of neocolonialist political economy, what kind of experimental audio-visual artworks offer new perspectives for pitching ecomediatic data?

Keywords: big data, noise, ecology, infertile data, credit, friction, control

Adopting the concept of “human gaze” by Randy Malamud  (2016), this paper provides a textual analysis of how the
environmental documentary Philippine Seas of the Philippine
television station GMA Network portrayed the sea and its components (i.e. species, landscapes) through their narratives, music, sound, and mise-en-scene. The documentary’s narrative or discussion is dominantly anthropocentric or human-centered in
character as it describes and treats the sea and its components as mere sources of materials for the fulfilment of the needs and other pleasures of humans. While there are small and infrequent moments when the narration in the documentary explicitly states that the sea “belongs” to marine creatures and that it is their habitat, the discussion always goes back to an exposition on how the sea and its components would be of benefit to the Filipino people in various aspects. This anthropocentric discourse leads to the portrayal of the sea and its components as subaltern. The subalternity of the sea and its creatures is textualized or represented in the documentary according to two tropes - infantilization and objectification. Infantilization could be observed through the documentary’s portrayal of the sea and its creatures as helpless sentient beings who have little to no ability to protect or defend themselves from human use or abuse. Related to this portrayal is the framing of human beings, including the host of the documentary, as the more powerful species who are able to serve as protectors, defenders, saviors, or stewards of them. Meanwhile, objectification of the seas and its components in the documentary could be seen in three ways – the portrayal of them as spectacle, as entertainment, and as materials for jthe fulfilment of human needs.

This is a chapter from the book ECOMEDIA: KEY ISSUES, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. In this essay, I argue that ecocriticism must pay attention to the flow of narratives, images, and other representations across media. Special attention given to the theories of Henry Jenkins and their application to the analysis of recent environmental activism surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline.

Media are a powerful educational force that teaches about the relationship between humans and living systems while also physiologically impacting the environment. However, although long considered a tool for promoting critical thinking and cultural citizenship, media literacy does not adequately address environmental sustainability. Drawing on original research, Antonio López demonstrates how common media literacy practices reinforce belief systems at the root of unsustainable behaviors. By combining emerging literacies from social media, networked activism, sustainability education, critical media literacy, and digital ecopedagogy, the author offers a solutions oriented critique and paradigm-shifting reappraisal of media education by advocating “ecomedia literacy.” This groundbreaking book builds on López’s previous two books, Mediacology and The Media Ecosystem, by offering a cutting-edge and radical reappraisal of conventional media literacy practices. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, this book is ideal for students and educators of media literacy, media studies, and cultural studies, and will also be vital to those advocating sustainability education, environmental studies, and social justice.

In the final chapter from the anthology NORDIC NARRATIVES OF NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT, eds Reinhard Hennig, et al,  Cheryl J. Fish writes about conflicts over land use and environmental injustices in Sapmi areas, and how aesthetically fragmented, visual and verbal eco-media by filmmaker Liselotte Wadstedt in her KIRUNA films, and by Marja Helander in her stark series of photographs, "SILENCE." are challenging the status quo. Fish claims significance for the ways in which sami women use elegiac narrative and topical intimacy to challenge the Nordic states' policies and practices that harm Sami communities.

This article draws attention to how photography is changing art, by imagining a politics through which to structure a future around something other than the failed visions of technological modernization and nuclear expansion. Focusing on the ongoing environmental damage of events such as Chernobyl 32 years later, the author considers the Swedish artist Lina Selander's 'Lenin's Lamp Glows in the Peasant Hut' to examine how photography and video may work together to address the present and future force of that disaster's ongoing environmental aftermath with history's failed Soviet dream of progress. She proposes that 'Lenin's Lamp', in its work with the temporality of material remains and impressions, is a work of hauntological environmental art that engages viewers in hope and dread. How the work stages this dual affective response through its work with the temporalities of photographic and filmic artifacts is the subject of this article.

This article draws attention to how photography is changing art, by imagining a politics through which to structure a future around something other than the failed visions of technological modernization and nuclear expansion. Focusing on the ongoing environmental damage of events such as Chernobyl 32 years later, the author considers the Swedish artist Lina Selander's 'Lenin's Lamp Glows in the Peasant Hut' to examine how photography and video may work together to address the present and future force of that disaster's ongoing environmental aftermath with history's failed Soviet dream of progress. She proposes that 'Lenin's Lamp', in its work with the temporality of material remains and impressions, is a work of hauntological environmental art that engages viewers in hope and dread. How the work stages this dual affective response through its work with the temporalities of photographic and filmic artifacts is the subject of this article.

Hannah Rowan’s Prima Materia focuses on
the element of water as a means for representing
the interconnection of ecological systems. We
associate water with its formlessness as well as
how it concretises into the threshold formations
of ice, liquid, and vapour. This two-fold chemical
property—indefinite form and specific material
configuration dependent on environmental
contingency—is a key expression for representing
how ecological systems scale in visual art. In this
essay, I discuss how water and its unique formal
properties are taken up as a central metaphor in
artistic practice that communicates how ecological
systems interrelate with one another, otherwise
how larger-order and smaller-order systems scale.

In today’s China of big data and big pollution, “clouds” are computerized and darkened simultaneously, generating socio-political crisis, anxiety and uncertainty. This essay examines the interplay between networked clouds and polluted clouds by investigating the development and usage of environment-related mobile applications that have gained growing popularity among tech-savvy citizens who use such apps on their cell phones to collect data of pollutions and generate discussions and actions about environmental damage in China. The history of portable, personal devices such as Walkman and mobile phones has often been studied as techno-social development toward “mobile privatization.” But the case study of Chinese eco-apps rather points to the reverse direction—mobile collectivization, which is technically enabled through crowd sourcing and cloud computing. Such a tendency toward mobile collectivization highlights the eco-system of mobile apps that connect between the micro-individual and the macro-social, which, in this particular case, also function for ecological purpose to tackle environmental problems. In other words, the curious case of Chinese eco-apps provides us with an opportunity to clash the emerging conceptual inquiry of the so-called “eco-media” with the long-existing theoretical debate of media ecology.  After all, what do we mean by “eco” and “media” in these seemingly self-evident terms? If media define our relationship with the world, will the virtual clouds of mobile computing affect the ways in which we interact with natural clouds? The eco-apps, by bringing pollution as data into our daily encounters with media platforms, effectively shatters the boundary between the ecosystem of media and the actual ecology of environment, making us rethink the complex interplay between technology and nature in historical and socio-political contexts of China.

This article draws attention to how photography is changing art, by imagining a politics through which to structure a future around something other than the failed visions of technological modernization and nuclear expansion. Focusing on the ongoing environmental damage of events such as Chernobyl 32 years later, the author considers the Swedish artist Lina Selander’s ‘Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant Hut’ to examine how photography and video may work together to address the present and future force of that disaster’s ongoing environmental aftermath with history’s failed Soviet dream of progress. She proposes that ‘Lenin’s Lamp’, in its work with the temporality of material remains and impressions, is a work of hauntological environmental art that engages viewers in hope and dread. How the work stages this dual affective response through its work with the temporalities of photographic and filmic artifacts is the subject of this article.

In 'Twilight of the Eidos: Rhetoric, Ecology, Media (and White Noise)', Daniel Adleman explores philosophy's traditional exclusion of rhetoric as a part of a larger campaign against unregulated affect. Drawing on the work of Kenneth Burke and Peter Sloterdijk, as well as Don DeLillo's Reagan-era novel White Noise, Adleman's article makes a case for the integration of new-rhetorical optics into lines of inquiry concerned with media ecology. This 'rhecomedial' approach to complex environments, Adleman contends, is especially germane to the turbulent structures of feeling that we now confront in the wake of Donald Trump's assumption of the American presidency and the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. KEYWORDS New rhetoric; media ecology; Kenneth Burke; Peter Sloterdijk; Don DeLillo; White Noise Every question selects a field of battle, and in this selection it forms the nature of the answers.