School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableYes/No: Referenda and Mandates(Social Text Online, 2023-11-14)We are in the early stages of collaborative research into disaffection and cultural politics. Observing these referenda makes clear to us that passionate engagement and apathy are not polar opposites in the field of cultural politics. On the contrary, disaffection and rage are symptoms of the same estrangement from democratic norms. Rather than apply a model to these campaigns and results, we want to see what they can tell us about broader trends in contemporary political culture. We have however found some preliminary ways of thinking through the problem that may be helpful for others trying to work through similar challenges.
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ItemImagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014(Informa UK Limited, 2023-01-02)The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthro-pological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.
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ItemIntroductio - Cut to Green: Tracking the Growth of Ecocinema Studies(Routledge, 2023)It has become increasingly clear, in the decade since our frst volume of Ecocinema Theory and Practice appeared in late 2012, that flm can no longer be considered apart from its imbrication in the fabric of the world. Until the close of the twentieth century, it may have been possible to ignore the material connection of celluloid reels with the oil industry, or the fact that drive-in movies depended on paving large tracts of ground. Even then, however, it was difcult to miss the insistent ecological themes that flmmakers returned to over and over in their onscreen messaging. We follow Hegel’s old edict about Minerva’s owl that only fies at dusk ([1820] 1991) when our hindsight helps us understand how the ruin of “frst nature” becomes really apparent only when cinema, along with much of our culture, economy, and politics, moved into the “second nature” of virtual data. The majority of ecocritical cinema and media studies conducted so far has come in this century when, arguably, cinema and other media seemed to have fnally severed the indexical umbilical that attached it to the physical world and become digital information. While Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1962, gives a respectable start date for the modern environmental movement, cinema studies has taken a considerable amount of time to catch up.
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ItemUnsustainable Cinema: Global Supply Chains(Routledge, 2023)Supply chains connect materials and their refining, manufacture, fabrication and assembly, and governance and logistics. These three domains have been extensively examined by ecomedia scholars in terms of goods, but in film we need also to look at the global trade in services, including movement of engineering and design expertise, and the chains of locations, props, costumes and extras, local second units, and subcontractors in postproduction, marketing and transmission. Materials, manufacture and governance of goods and services are further complicated by the circuits of materials, energy and waste that cycle through them, This chapter will focus on the logistical infrastructure underpinning this complex, the supply chain, taking examples from extraction (notably of minerals from waste dumps), fabrication (particularly of optical components and assemblies), film production and the governance of global trade in goods and services (notably streaming). Inspired by work on logistics including the Global Green Media and Logistical Worlds networks and informed by recent neo-nationalist disruptions to the familiar globalisation of the last years of the 20th and first decade of the 21st centuries, the chapter will look at ecocritical dimensions of global trade in media devices, infrastructures and content. It will enquire into the governance of technical standards, economic policy, extra-territorial contract law, financial services, risk management and policing and how they implicate the environment in the socio-cultural and technological practice of film. The chapter will link these observations to individual film productions and to the themes and style of films made in the ‘global studio’
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ItemEcocinema Theory and Practice 2(Routledge, 2022)This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research. Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis. This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies
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ItemAfter the Future: Inhabiting Apathy in New Media Arts(MIMESIS EDIZIONI, 2022)“Media arts” is a phrase that has circulated for a century now, dealing with electromechanical media (radio, film, rotary press, photography) and more recently with electronic media (video, electronic music, digital arts). With benefit of hindsight it became doctrine that all forms of art were media (Greenberg’s and McLuhan’s different historical versions of medium specificity); that all media were digital (Kittler) and – in what may well be the hegemonic idea of the 21st century – that all human activity, even all ecological activity, has always been fundamentally communicative; that we have been able to conceive of an aesthetic without medium. No matter that the substitute – the concept, especially in anti-retinal art – is in many respects a discrete medium embedded in the entrails of late 20th century theories of language. This article first proposes this diagnosis, then sets out to decipher why the contradictions of art and technology, and more broadly of science and the social, have brought us to this conjuncture, and what kind of opportunity it presents for the (re)making of both arts and media.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntroduction. Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media(MIMESIS EDIZIONI, 2022)Discussions around art and technology may seem rather predictable nowadays. Technology is everywhere; it surrounds our bodies, guides our behaviours, provides suggestions, helps us and often even replaces us. Technology frightens us and fascinates us; it sometimes seems to be close and, at other times, appears remote. Precisely due to its pervasiveness in our lives, it seems to be everywhere, even in the world of contemporary art. In any exhibition, biennial or art festival, there is something “technological”. Videos, sound installations, robotic or mechanical kinetics, the use of the Internet or geo-localisation, augmented, virtual and mixed reality, artificial intelligence can also be found in the artistic production of people who, at first sight and until a few years ago, we would not have included under the label of new media art.
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Item‘Foreword: Otherwise than Conscious’ in Marie-Luise Angerer, Nonconscious: On the Affective Synching of Mind and Machine. Translated by Nicholas Grindell(meson press, 2022)With Nonconscious, Marie-Luise Angerer, a leading figure in the international vanguard of thinkers working with affect, brings us a detailed map of the terrain traversed by affect theory since Whitehead, offering critiques and insights at every turn before presenting the vista perceivable from the heights of its convergence of feminist epistemology, science and technology studies, vitalist and actor-network ontologies, psychology and neuroscience.
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ItemTurning disaster into crisis(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2022-07)This article suggests that the conditions driving the still-unresolved global financial crisis that began in 2007 depend on a generalised condition of capitalist coloniality that profits from disasters. It proposes that the task of cultural studies is to convert these disasters into crises: critical and therefore history-making opportunities.
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ItemPandemic: Invisibility and silence(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-04-07)Can the COVID pandemic be understood in any other than ecocritical and decolonial terms? It has brought nothing new except perhaps a certain fatalism in politics, borrowed from eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic visions of migration, the Anthropocene, pestilence, and neo-populism exacerbate longer-term trends. Religious fanatics with machine guns take whips to outsiders whose gender or skin colour they despise at the behest of billionaire warlords from the Texas border to Kabul. But COVID-19 coincides with some intriguing cultural novelties, most of all a plague of visibility traced here through Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, paired with a simultaneous mode of disappearance associated with the video image. Hegemonic transitions, the rise of financialization, and extractive postcolonization tie pandemic to fading (and therefore vengeful) American individualism and the rising (and therefore aggressive) Chinese command economy. The virus is occasion for profit: only a new and ecologically scaled cosmopolitanism can save us.