For our last Digital Aesthetics workshop of Fall 2023, please join us in welcoming Thomas Lamarre, who will present on “Harvesting Light” on December 5, 5-7PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Watt Dining Room, where refreshments will be served. Please find the abstract and bio below. We look forward to seeing you there!
Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/mrxahnbe
Abstract:
Discussions of environmental media tend, as if ineluctably, to introduce a rigid divide between economy and ecology, with infrastructures, markets, and geopolitical forces on one side of destruction, while ecology implies an utterly different, highly vulnerable set of processes. This talk aims to reconsider some of these seemingly insuperable divides through a focus on artificial photosynthesis, which often described as a form of bioinspiration, biomimicry, or homeotechnology. Part of what is interesting about artificial photosynthesis is that it tentatively blurs and contests the distinction between artificial and natural. It thus encourages a rethinking of the production of value in terms of a systematicity that does not rely on a strict divide between economy and ecology. Here I propose to explore the production of value by opening a dialogue between artificial photosynthesis and some recent thinkers of environmental Marxism such as Jason Moore and Saitō Kōhei. In this way, I hope also to reconsider what media studies has to offer environmental studies in an era of anthropogenetic climate change.
Bio:
Thomas Lamarre teaches in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Publications on media, thought, and material history include work on communication networks in 9thcentury Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000); silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005); animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018). Major translations include Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (2012), Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2012), David Lapoujade’s William James, Empiricism, and Pragmatism (2019), and Isabelle Stengers’s Making Sense in Common (2023).