Tag: environment

“The Environmental Data Stack” — Jussi Parikka at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, January 7, 2025

We’re pleased to announce our first event of 2025! Please join us in welcoming Jussi Parikka, who will present on “The Environmental Data Stack” on Tuesday, Jan 7, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. We look forward to seeing you there after the holiday break!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/ykhvtu63

Abstract:

This talk tests the notion of “environmental data stack” as a particular kind of a methodological problem space (Lury 2021). The term defines the multiple levels of “problematics” of grounding environmental data in alternating scales of reference, in different technological forms of capture of data, and in various interacting registers of sensing.  The environmental data stack builds on existing work in critical data studies where the situated, even spatialized notions of data are developed – and it also lends itself to a sense of the politics and aesthetics of data, where aesthetics is not necessarily about art (it can be though) but about the wider context of materials, sensing, and modeling. This work relates to my interest in cultural techniques of data and software studies, including the intersection of ecomedia and computational practices. The talk will thus feature some examples from recent and on-going work in different projects such as the Design and Aesthetics for Enviornmental Data (https://cc.au.dk/en/dafed/).

Bio:

Jussi Parikka is professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) as well as is the founding co-director of the Environmental Media and Aesthetics -research program. He also holds a visiting professorship at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). His books have addressed media archaeology, the ecological underpinnings of discourses of digital culture from animals to geology, and most recently, transformations of visual culture. The more recent books include Operational Images (2023) as well as the co-authored Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024, with Abelardo Gil-Fournier). Both are available as open access. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Currently he is developing a new project on datafication of agriculture.

This event is generously co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Invisible Landscapes — Film Screening & Q&A, Nov. 13, 2023

The Department of Art & Art History presents a special screening of the documentary film Invisible Landscapes. This event is free & open to the public. A Q&A with Ivo Bystřičan (Director) and Tereza Swadoschova (Producer) will be held after the screening. 

It sounds like a bird’s song, and you can’t take your ears off it. But it’s not – it’s just the popping bubbles of a melting glacier. A group of musicians equipped with sensitive microphones and headphones set out on an exploration. They head to places in the Czech and Icelandic countryside both marred by industry and untouched by man to discover and understand the sound of catastrophe – the sound of ongoing climate change, which in itself can be far more beautiful, and more imaginative, than what it heralds. While sight allows phenomena and things to be encompassed in a static state and in a certain entirety, hearing allows us to understand how they affect and clash with their surroundings. Sound is the consequence of an event that happened in the past and points towards a future now being decided, one that may potentially be inevitable and destructive for us. It cannot yet be seen in the invisible landscapes, but – if we listen carefully – it is already there. 

Czech Republic, 2022, 48 minutes.

Ivo Bystřičan is Czech documentary director, dramaturg, screenwriter and producer. His work focuses on social and environmental topics with a sociological accent. His feature documentary debut Byeway (2014) focuses on the controversial role of the state in the construction of the highway as a public good. In his films, he dives into the tobacco industry, industrial agriculture, resource extraction, refugee crisis or the evolution of industrial capitalism. He focuses on uncovering the latent functions of institutions and the unintended consequences of an action. Invisible Landscapes is his latest film as a part of the multidisciplinary project Future Landscapes. He also works as a dramaturg of documentary films and audio podcasts, and lecturer of film workshops. He is the author of several documentary podcast series. He graduated from sociology at Masaryk University, Brno and documentary filmmaking at FAMU, Prague.

Tereza Swadoschová is a Czech producer and programmer. Her work engages with science, using art as a primary tool, and emphasizes social and environmental themes. “Future Landscapes,” her latest project, delves into the insights that sound can provide about our future. This is represented through documentaries, a podcast series, a music album, and artistic interpretations of rituals. Tereza is the head of the Inspiration Forum at the Jihlava IDFF. This platform annually hosts discussions on a range of topics from social, political, cultural to environmental issues. She co-founded the first platform in the Czech Republic dedicated to the ethics of documentary filmmaking. A graduate of Masaryk University, Tereza is currently collaborating with artist Kateřina Šedá on a project that focuses on the role of industry in marginalized areas.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located in the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is free all day on weekends and after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci@stanford.edu. 

This event is made possible with the generous support of:

CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
Department of Art & Art History
Department of English
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Film and Media Studies

Post-Cinema and/as Environmental Media Theory #SCMS15

Post-Cinematic_Environment

I am very happy to announce that the panel I will be chairing at this year’s SCMS conference, “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” has been chosen as one of eight panels to be officially sponsored by the Media and the Environment Special Interest Group. The group, of which I am proud to be a member, defines its mission thus:

The Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group (MESIG) aims to provide a forum for shared discussion of research and pedagogy at the intersections of media and environment. We believe that nearly every aspect of film and media practice and studies–from materials manufacturing and physical infrastructures, to filming locations and resources, to audiovisual aspects and themes, and beyond to marketing, preservation, obsolescence, and also scholarly discourse–touches matters of the environment and sustainability. Various approaches from an environmentalist perspective have been taken and more are still being developed to investigate how our mediated cultural practices have, do, and will position humans in relation to physical and natural worlds. How can we further film and media studies as a global–read planetary–concern, focused on dire changes and issues affecting the Earth and our natural surroundings? We believe our field has much to contribute to discussions and findings more frequently held in and attributed to science disciplines and Environmental Studies. With this Scholarly Interest Group, we seek to cultivate the study of significant matters of media and the environment within our field and through the representative collective that is SCMS.

I am honored that our panel — which includes one explicitly environmental film/media theorist (Adrian Ivakhiv) but also three others (Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, and Mark Hansen) who are helping to define the subject of post-cinema in broadly ecological terms — has been chosen for sponsorship by the Media and the Environment SIG, and I am grateful for their recognition of the topic’s relevance for our ongoing attempts to rethink the relations between humans, our media technologies, and the environments that we inhabit, access, and transform with and through them.

Here, finally, is a list of all eight panels sponsored by the SIG:

A23: Ecocriticism

F8: Fossils, Films, and Sedimentation: Ecocritical Approaches to Archival Moving Images

G4: Media Waste: Technological Systems and the Environment

H22: Excess Hollywood: Economies of Waste in Media Industries

J12: Engaging Ecocinema: The Affects and Effects of Environmental Documentaries

J17: Media Environments

K7: Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory

P4: Cinema in/of the Anthropocene