Raw (2016): Ecohorror and Appetite in the Anthropocene

Kristen Angierski

Raw—Julia Ducournau’s horror film best known for causing fainting at film festivals—is designed to make your stomach turn. The plot centers a lifelong vegetarian Justine who, at first, refuses to participate in her veterinary school’s bloody hazing rituals involving the consumption of animal flesh. But ultimately, like Eve, she eats. This act awakens a darkness in Justine: an unquenchable appetite for animals—human animals too.

The film is a meditation on “primal hungers,” the animality of the human, the violence of women’s coming-of-age (a revolting pubic hair removal scene comes to mind). But Raw also has much to offer as a piece of ecohorror vis-à-vis its combination of ecological awareness and the tropes of body horror. Raw might even reasonably be classed as “cli-fi.” For it is impossible to discuss the ethics of consumption without acknowledging the ecological disaster that is factory farming: footage of which can also instigate nausea, fainting, horror. Is the factory farm the ultimate arena of ecohorror—a space that blends ecological devastation with profound cruelty, perverse gore, and an almost unconquerable desire to look away—a push/pull of fascination and disgust? What can this affective mode—disgust and horror—do? Is there an environmentalist politics of nausea? For this symposium on ecomedia, I am most interested in thinking through, with the help of Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, the ways in which the “viscerality” of films like Raw might be a starting place for ecological ethics, especially in an age of potential environmental collapse (sometimes called the Anthropocene) brought on in part by that impossibly complex phenomenon: appetite. Which affective, ethical, activist, appetitive doors do revolting ecomedia open—and is it only to let the blood out?

Cinematic Imaginaries of Gender and the Environment: An Examination of the Work of Hayao Miyazaki

Ramya K Tella

Through his cinema, Hayao Miyazaki has explored cultural and socio-technical imaginaries that have led to varying interpretations of natural and built environments. However, the importance of Miyazaki’s contribution to an understanding of environmental discourses is especially significant when viewed in the context of his portrayal of female protagonists; key examples include Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Spirited Away. In these films, the protagonists engage with themes of modernisation-mechanisation, weaponisation, and overconsumption respectively, which this paper/presentation examines, through the employment of a nuanced socio-cultural imagery. The narratives of the characters resonate a strong attachment to nature and feminist practice; they each contribute to an understanding of ecofeminism that is attentive to the history and needs of the present citizen. This paper argues that the performances of socio-historical and environmental narratives by Miyazaki’s protagonists has the potential to travel and be understood in contexts outside of Japan- specifically, in the Global South.

World-building: The Unnatural Geologies of Joyce Hinterding and David Haines

Susan Ballard

In Christchurch New Zealand in September 2010 the earth gave one of its necessary shudders. As the energy shock reached a peak ground acceleration of 2.2G many of us could not help but pay attention. Amidst the long sequence of aftershocks, Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding made recordings of the earth as it settled into a pattern of movement. In the interactive installation Geology (2015) Haines and Hinterding use these recordings to offer a sublime immersion in a dynamic land formed by relations between humans, our living systems, and the planet. In the interactive world of Geology (2015) dimensionality and duration determine how we conduct ourselves. In a Kinect space delineated by geometry and motion our body hits the screen and we are in. Reminding us that all geology, all matter requires witnessing of some kind. Earthquakes are natural circuits of release, their impacts last on in our bodies through what New Zealand media theorist Zita Joyce calls “body energies” where the residual energy of the earthquake becomes an affective way of knowing a place. Haines and Hinterding entice us to use our bodies to navigate through a ecomedia world made both familiar and abstract. This world-building is perfectly natural; as if we are inhabiting the drawings that map the underground worlds explored by Athanasius Kircher in Mundus Subterraneus we sense the humming energy of the rocks. There is a third layer to the work. A third world hovering on top of its antipodes. It seems to be an unstable world of timber, shaken and fractured. We suddenly inhabit the perspective of the rock, no longer a human sized body we slam ourselves against the edges. We rain down on the timber, the geometries resist and shatter. We are inside and back out. The energy folds and creases across the land and we are floating, witnessing a beautiful collapse. This essay suggests that for Haines and Hinterding living amidst the media geologies of the Anthropocene is just the beginning.

Biography:

Dr. Susan Ballard is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who teaches Art History and Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong where she is also the co-­‐director of the C3P: Centre for Critical Creative Practice. Su’s research is concerned with the ways in which art intersects with big ideas about the environment, technology, and cultural politics. Recent essays have examined artistic negotiations of ecological transformation, species extinction, and natural disasters. Through collaborative partnerships and projects she facilitates discussions of the role of creative practice in the age of the Anthropocene.

The Extinction-haunted Setting of The Monster that Challenged the World (1957) 

Bridgitte Barclay

The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) is part of a science fiction-horror subgenre reflecting extinction fears. A number of films feature prehistoric animals in unknown landscapes (uncharted islands or new planets, for instance). These films engage with extinction discourses of the era – the loss of the American west and certain American species, the growing popular science of prehistoric life, and new fears of atomic-induced human extinction. The Monster That Challenged the World reflects these, as well as the already-haunted real-world landscape of its setting – The Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is a man-made environmental catastrophe that rehydrated an ancient lake bed and eventually creating an apocalyptic setting that foreshadowed human extinction. The film reflects a longing for natural spaces that is, in “declensionist” narratives as Ursula K. Heise notes, “intimately linked to a foreboding sense of its looming destruction.”

Bill McKibben asserts in Eaarth that humans in our current sixth extinction are as settlers on an unknown planet, writing, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has – even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live on that old planet…. It’s a different place. A different planet.” This resonates with these midcentury narratives of extinction-haunted landscapes, as well.  Given this, re-reading mid-20^th century sf-horror films about de-extinct creatures in unexplored natural spaces (on Earth and in space) can inform our understanding of extinction- haunted landscapes, including our current one. The Monster that Challenged the World reawakens the past extinct and foreshadows the future extinct in both setting and monster, and framing the film as eco-horror emphasizes not only the creature-feature fun of its original intent but also emphasizes the film’s haunted setting, a real-world horror that continues into present day.

Beyond Dystopia, Apocalypse and Techno-fantasy: Imagining Sustainability Transitions in Science Fiction Futures

Jeffrey Barber

This presentation will explore the challenge in science fiction film to envision and inspire engagement in transitions to a sustainable future. Over past decades a growing number of films have used climate change and other environmental crises as dramatic narrative frames, some to provoke alarm, concern and engagement, others simply using these issues as a topical background action vehicle. In many if not most of these stories the future is dystopic, apocalyptic or conveniently resolving current crises through dramatic techno-fantasy breakthroughs e.g., the Replicator of Star Trek or the ability to colonize and start anew on other worlds. What we do not often see are thoughtful visions of strategies and struggles involved in the kind of socio-cultural, political and personal transitions that could lead to what has been

described as a “sustainable future”. Understandably most films today are constrained by the risk-averse formulas of audience preference and return on investment as well as a consumer culture permeated by neoliberal norms. Today the science fiction and fantasy genre is flush with libertarian tropes celebrating vigilante heroes and violence in contrast to stories imagining the kind of future world, relationships and experience we would hopefully like to see emerge. While such visions and narratives do not easily fit into the expected action vehicles identified with “science fiction”, this does not prevent writers and filmmakers from moving across other genres and conventions to develop stories exploring the kinds of challenges and possibilities involved in sustainability transitions, i.e., social imaginaries of how humanity manages to survive and evolve in overcoming the kinds of threats and inequalities, political quagmires, and lack of hope which often drive audiences to the cinema to escape.

Climatic Catastrophe and Ecocritical Awakening in Ship Breaker and The Water Wars

Saba Pirzadeh

Environmental crises, such as global warming, climate change, resource depletion, desertification, and species extinction, are increasing in intensity, leading to the proliferation of young adult novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) and Cameron Stracher’s The Water Wars (2011) that depict dystopian worlds where environmental catastrophes inflict severe physical and psycho-emotive harm on adolescents as depicted by the depraved lives of the novels’ protagonists Nailer and Vera. The significance of Ship Breaker and The Water Wars lies in their projection of climate change and resource depletion as results of capitalism, industrialization, and environmental exploitation. Employing an ecocritical lens to analyze Ship Breaker and The Water Wars, this paper explores the critical potentiality of young adult fiction in counter posing the hopelessness of dystopian worlds with the hopefulness of adolescent agency in mitigating ecological crises. In this regard, the paper highlights how the dystopian worlds of Ship Breaker and The Water Wars are engendered by ecopolitics, environmental racism, and militarism. Furthermore, this paper argues that Bacigalupi and Stracher recognize that anthropocentric conceptions of nature determine its future and thereby use the pragmatic theoretical framework of enlightened anthropocentrism to emphasize environmental concerns within human constructs of value and conservation. This discussion of enlightened anthropocentrism, then leads to an exposition of human agency given that the adolescent protagonists (Nailer and Vera) must learn to escape, evade, and encounter the everyday violence of climate change. Exploring the differential degrees of agency in both novels, the paper ultimately establishes how Ship Breaker and The Water Wars emphasize the affirmative aspect of adolescent agency during eco-crises and strategically use the dystopian genre to “wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it” (Dan Bloom, cited in Vemuri).

Coding Climate Change: Digital Aesthetics and the Legacy of the Lucas Gusher

Lisa FitzGerald

 In amongst the bleak predictions of global ecosystems collapse, climate change has infiltrated the mind-set of contemporary digital culture. This paper examines how the digital aesthetics surrounding climate change can be influenced by the material legacies of environmental exploitation. Digital tools have transformed the way we produce art and the emergence of a digital aesthetic has changed the way we visualize our environment. An example of this is John Garrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 depicting the site where the renowned ‘Lucas Gusher’ erupted in Spindletop, Texas in 1901. Western Flag was broadcast across three media: streamed online, interrupting regular programming on Channel 4 and on an outdoor LED screen at Somerset House, London. In Garrard’s artwork, the location of the world’s first oil field is recreated as a digital real-time simulation with a flagpole expelling black smoke in place of a flag. Commissioned by Channel 4 to mark Earth Day, Western Flag depicts an event that initiated the drive for black gold and the global transformation of the earth’s ecosystems. This paper uses that artwork to examine how climate change has destabilized traditional representations of the environment and how that feeds into the work being created in Digital and New Media Art.

Environmental Degradation and Re-greening: Ecomusicology study of the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

Olusegon Titus

The discovery and production of large oil deposit in Oloibiri community in the late 1950s in the present Niger Delta region of Nigeria have brought unimaginable environmental crisis to the region. It signals the beginning of environmental degradation, the impoverishment of the tress and vegetables and indeed the human beings who inhabit the Region. Several musicians have sung about the environmental degradation and the need for re-greening of Niger Delta land. Their music continue to give authority and relevance to the struggle of regaining environmental sustainability Such activist musicians include Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Timaya, and Lover Boy among others. Their music seeks to draw attention to the fate of both humans and non-humans in the face of oil exploration and its negative consequences on the greening of the Niger Delta. Also, it engages the nostalgia of the greening, and environmental friendliness the region had experienced before the oil explorations and extractions. This paper engages with Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and environmentalism of the poor and unpinned the discourse on ecomusicological theory, cultural history, and ethnography, textual and musical analysis. The paper suggests that music is powerful enough to mirror the deteriorating environment of the Niger Delta people. It also explains the devastating effects of the oil extraction on the green environment. The paper also elucidates the advocacy that music play in environmental cleanup, restoration and restitution of sustainable environment in Niger Delta region.

Fly Fishing in the Digital Age: From Eastern Rises to #KeepEmWet

Cory Willard

The cultural and positive impact of fly fishing films and other representations has largely been overlooked by critics who seem principally suspicious of the films as being glorified ads for tourism or expressions of visual manipulation bordering on ecopornography—a tradition carried on from the notorious history of using certain types of natural imagery to illicit strong senses of visual desire in the print publications of organizations like Orion, the Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club. In The Ecocinema Experience, for example, Scott Macdonald argues that “[i]n conventional, commercial film and television, whatever beautiful imagery we do see is onscreen briefly, and as background to the ‘more important’ melodramatic activities in the foreground. Viewers are implicitly trained to see the beauties of landscape and place as ephemeral and comparatively insignificant, not something deserving of sustained attention or commitment” (21). Despite critical suspicions toward the visuals of fly fishing film as being linked to consumerism and exploitation, the fact remains that the act of fly fishing, the work of fly fishing communities, and particularly fly fishing films—with their various engagements with land, waterways, and artistry—act as a catalyst for change that is expressed as an embodied place connectedness that promotes ecological awareness, activism, and a bond with the sacred through fly fishing.

Primarily through a study of the 2010 film Eastern Rises and the social media hashtag #KeemEmWet, this presentation shall explore the ways that digital and social media have altered the way fly fishers experience the sport and how, particularly through visual media, the practice of fly fishing grapples with important ecological questions and encourages ethical practices.

Going Rogue: A Material Feminist Reading of AltUsNatParkService as Environmental Rhetoric and Ecomedia’s New Resistance Movement

Amy Propen

“First they came for the scientists… And the National Parks Services said, ‘lol, no’ and went rogue and we were all like, ‘I was not expecting the park rangers to lead the resistance, none of the dystopian novels I read prepared me for this but cool.’” This powerfully clever rationale initially positioned human actors—park rangers, as responsible for the emergence of this digital performance of environmental resistance; however, a material feminist reading, while not precluding the role of the human in such environmental accounts, understands a more nuanced rhetorical configuration. While Karen Barad’s (2008) agential realism is not explicitly aligned with human intentionality, she acknowledges that “particular possibilities for intra-acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail an ethical obligation to intra-act responsibly in the world’s becoming” (178). Likewise, in Jane Bennett’s (2010) agential assemblage, humans are hardly the only players on the field; nonetheless, she writes that we may consider “the kind of striving that may be exercised by a human within the assemblage” (38). This presentation toggles between these two notions, ultimately conceptualizing AltUSNatParkService as an emergent, rhetorical configuration of ecomedia, catalyzed by the intra-actions of witting and unwitting actors and institutions that together reckon with and constitute a new environmental resistance. From park rangers, to a now-vulnerable EPA, to rogue national parks, to the Rusty-patched bumblebee, I pair a material feminist approach (Alaimo; Barad; Bennett) with rhetoric scholar Barbara Biesecker’s (1992) understanding of Foucault’s theory of resistance, to argue that AltUSNatParkService and its concomitant bodies, sites, and institutions intra-act in ways that help configure an emergent posthuman environmental rhetoric that performs ethical responsibility in an age of Anthropocene technoscience.

Give It Time: Reframing Place Through Slow TV

Amanda Hagood

Slow TV, originally pioneered by Norway’s NRK public television network in 2009 with its Bergensbanen—minutt for minutt broadcast, is now (so to speak) creeping into the programming of networks across the globe. The growing genre features continuous, minimally edited footage of commonplace events, such as the eight hour train journey depicted in Bergensbanen or birds visiting a feeder (Piip-­‐ show, 2014). While U.S. news outlets have greeted slow TV programs as the perfect “antidote” to a frenetic and divisive news cycle, NRK producer Thomas Hellum, envisions slow TV as an entirely new way of telling televisual stories. In a 2014 TED Talk, he attributed slow TV’s appeal to the sense of “event” it creates: in one sense, a temporal connection between a real time subject and viewer, but in an equally important way, a connection to others who are simultaneously viewing and participating in the documented events. Recalling NRK’s 2011 Hurtigruten—minutt for minutt broadcast, which documented a 134-­‐hour coastal voyage, Hellum recalls the crowds of Norwegians who showed up in every port to participate in the program: “…they made the program what it became. They made all the stories.”

Slow TV presents an interesting field for ecocritical exploration, which has in recent years experienced its own “slow” turn in asking how diverse media can accurately represent, let alone inspire action around complex, long term environmental issues and processes. Hellum’s implicit assertion—that slow TV engenders both a prolonged and sharpened attention to the world it portrays and a powerfully shared sense of place—invites the question of whether slow TV, like slow cinema, might provide a recalibrating lens to magnify and illuminate viewers’ relationship to place. This presentation explores the premise that slow TV is also “green” TV by analyzing the structure and content of several slow TV programs, reviewing viewer response, and, equally importantly, examining production practices for slow TV titles.

Hollywood’s Lifeboat Ethics

Graig Uhlin

This paper examines the cultural figure of the lifeboat, which emerges in the wake of environmental or economic crisis as a mode of transition to a new societal equilibrium. The lifeboat dramatizes, I argue, the actual or manufactured imposition of scarcity following the catastrophe of shipwreck, modeling life under limited resources. It characteristically functions as a seemingly neutral recalibration of society’s allocation of resources, serving as a mechanism for dividing the essential from the expendable. The lifeboat therefore raises political and ethical questions about how this division is determined, though it masks these considerations behind a purely rational decision-making process, a techno- scientific management of an ecosystem.

My presentation considers cinematic lifeboat narratives – primarily Hollywood films about environmental disaster such as 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) and Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013) – to examine to what extent environmental crisis exacerbates class difference rather than erasing it. It is commonly said that climate change affects humanity as a whole – as Dipesh Chakrabarty claims, there are no lifeboats in the Anthropocene. Yet, even as these films make populist appeals to our common humanity, they deploy the lifeboat as a means of insulating the wealthy from climate change’s most extreme consequences, leaving poorer populations vulnerable. I situate the class politics of Hollywood lifeboat narratives in relation to Garrett Hardin’s controversial 1974 essay “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” which imagined that foreign aid and lax immigration policies would “swamp the boats” of advanced economies, and that austerity measures would bring population back within Earth’s carrying capacity. The neoliberal response to crisis often adopts Hardin’s harsh prescriptions, and environmental disaster films, I argue, are symptomatic of the class inequities of this response.

References:

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today 8:4 (September 1974): 38-43, 123-26.

Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990 (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

Dynasty and #NoDAPL: The Messy Environmental Politics of 2010s Oil Soaps

Michaela Rife

On September 30, 2016, the entertainment news website Deadline reported that the team behind teen soap Gossip Girl was developing a reboot of the 1980s hit Dynasty, another primetime soap that traced the melodramas of scheming oil-rich families in Denver. In the same month private security forces hired by the energy firms behind the Dakota Access oil pipeline began a violent campaign against Water Protectors at the Standing Rock. A year later, months after the 45th president approved the pipeline, Dynasty premiered on the CW but differentiated itself from its predecessor by moving to Atlanta and including African American and Latinx main characters. Yet oil remains the foundation of Carrington and Colby wealth, even as the first season’s plotlines are sprinkled with fracking disasters and environmental protests. This paper interrogates the incompatible portrayals of twentieth century oil wealth narratives with twenty-first century environmental politics by asking what oil wealth means in mainstream television today. Furthermore, what are the representational stakes of seeing contemporary extractive landscapes through the lens of 1980s pop culture nostalgia? Of course, Dynasty is only the latest oil soap reboot. Dallas premiered in the summer of 2012, only months after President Obama rejected permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, after years of activist pressure, and ABC launched the original short lived drama Blood & Oil in September of 2015. All of these programs benefit from the cultural short hand of the oil tycoon which, as oil studies scholars have shown, connotes both a fabulous and morally compromised kind of wealth. But 2010s primetime soaps engage with, or seem sympathetic to, movements like #NoDAPL. This paper asks what it means for pop culture oil television to rely on narratives of warring oil families while gesturing to indigenous and environmental movements.

White Flight from Planet Earth: Inverted Quarantine in Interstellar

Michelle Yates

This paper is part of a larger project that examines the kinds of ideologies and ways of seeing the world that are embedded in the way climate fiction, namely popular Hollywood climate fiction film, produces and reflects American culture. In this paper, I examine the way that a more recent film Interstellar (2014) (re)produces particular hegemonic notions of race and gender, notions that are intimately linked to the environmental dimensions of the film. In Interstellar, a team of explorers, including Cooper played by Matthew McConaughey, leave Earth to seek a new planet for humans to inhabit. Due to Blight affecting the world’s food supply, Earth has become an uninhabitable Dust Bowl where human survivability is quickly coming to an end. In this film, Cooper functions as the heroic male agent – the explorer figure – who “saves” humanity by discovering a new world for human habitation, as supposedly happens by the end of the film. What audiences also see by the end of the film is that people, namely white people, have returned to civilization on board the spaceship Cooper (orbiting Saturn) as they wait for their new planet to be turned into a pristine, Garden of Eden.1 In this respect, Interstellar very much promotes a message regarding white fight from planet Earth (that’s not so unlike the message promoted by the 2008 animated film WALL-E). Furthermore, as the blog site Hail to You points out, the use of the term “blight” in Interstellar to describe the cause of environmental devastation on Earth very much has racialized overtones, mirroring a discourse of urban decay used to justify both white flight from the city in the post-World War II era as well as gentrification and the displacing of lower-income residents and residents of color from certain city neighborhoods in the present moment. In this respect, Interstellar represents a troubling contemporary phenomenon that Andrew Szasz dubs ‘inverted quarantine.’

Miyazaki, Seriously: What Would It Mean to Put Anime into the Teaching Canon of Ecomedia?

Anthony Lioi

The work of Japanese auteur Miyazaki Hayao represents the rubicon he likes to tell stories about himself. It is the river you cross to get to the witch’s house or the path to the edge of the forest: animation that counts as “cinema,” part of a cosmopolitan vocabulary, respectable because the French award awards to it. And yet, in Anglophone ecocriticism and environmental humanities, still entirely marginal. I have argued elsewhere that ecocriticism must overcome its bias toward literature and other media that descend from the spiritual uplift tradition of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. But if we succeeded in doing so, what would happen? Here I use Miyazaki as the basis of a thought experiment in which animation becomes part of the Ecomedia teaching canon, something one would expect to study when approaching the field.

If Miyazaki’s work were part of our teaching core, there would be methodological, pedagogical, and ultimately political consequences. First, our ideological bias toward Romantic and (post-)Protestant cultural frames would be displaced without being erased. Students would be obliged to contend with concepts of nature derived from Buddhist and animist traditions forcibly inflected by “Western” landscapes and philosophies. In matters of representation and form, we would have to grapple with anime’s adaptation of Disney’s American idiom in the post-war Japanese context. By the same token, we would be forced to examine animation as a medium for political critique of industrialism, nuclear proliferation, secularization, and imperialism.

In sum, the inclusion of Miyazaki in the teaching canon of Ecomedia Studies would promote a critical approach to planetary environmental justice while reinforcing basic skills of intertextual interpretation, formal analysis, and cultural literacy, making his work appropriate for general education classes as well as graduate seminars. That, as they say, is the hard sell.

Eco-sexual Imaginations of the Earth

Miriam Tola

This presentation draws on feminist and queer studies to examine the eco-sexual figuration of Lover Earth as counterpoint to Mother Earth. Evoked by grassroots activists as well as public figures such as Pope Francis and Angela Merkel, Mother Earth is an ubiquitous presence in contemporary environmentalism. Feminist scholars, however, have noted that this trope perpetuates the habit to feminize nature and confine women to the realms of reproduction and care. Moving away from Mother Earth, eco-sexual artists and activists propose to shift focus on the earth as a queer lover.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens coined the term “sexecology” to describe performances, films, and manifestoes in which they celebrate the pleasures of pollen-amorous practices ranging from tree- hugging to “grassilingus”. Imagining the earth as a queer lover, they argue, forces a reconsideration of questions of care and reciprocity. If Mother Earth implies that someone is taking care of humans, Lover Earth is someone humans desire to care for. This presentation engages limits and possibilities of sexecology. Analyzing films and other materials, it contends that while the image of the earth as queer lover complicates Mother Earth in important ways, it still relies on the notion of partnership between humans and the planet. Not unlike Mother Earth, sexecology obfuscates the turbulent complexity of geological, biological and chemical processes that human action affects and amplifies but is not capable of controlling. The talk concludes by exploring a different notion of care, one that takes radical alterity, rather than reciprocity, as point of departure.

Multi-species in an Emergency: Reshaping rural communities after the Argentinean 2001 Crisis in Albertina Carri’s film La Rabia

Valeria Meiller

“What might provide the basis for a life in common?” asks Cynthia Willet as the opening question for her reflections on how to set the basis for ethical multi- species communities (Interspecies Ethics, 2). Bridging the philosophical modern cleavage between nature and culture, and its derived binary of human and non- human life, has long been the concern of environmental thinking. This paper analyses the biosocial landscape of the film La Rabia (Albertina Carri, 2008) focusing on the representation of human and non-human relationships, and the way these relationships propose autre codes (Willet) for shaping alterity, solidarity, and ecological interactions.

I argue that the crisis of the neoliberal model that Argentina underwent as a consequence of its 2001 economic meltdown reinscribes the relationships of animals and humans. And, that the rural environment portrayed in La Rabia offers a gate for re-imagining those relationships through the use of visual and sound clues. The Argentinean economic crisis caused unemployment, riots, the fall of the government, a default of the foreign debt, and the end of the peso’s fixed exchanged rate to the US dollar. I contend that critics and annalists wrote exhaustively about these events but nobody dived into the environmental consequences of the crisis.

As a country with a farm base economy, an accurate interpretation of its economic meltdown should take animals into account. By adopting the perspective of Animal History, which Susan Nance defines as a subfield of history that “directs us to document the lives of historical animals as an intrinsically valuable history” (3), I expect to look at La Rabia as a cultural artifact that traces down interspecies solidarity as one of the main copping mechanism when confronting the falling of the neoliberal model.

Naturalizing White Supremacy in Low-Budget Shark Attack Movies

Carter Soles

Great white sharks are one of the most popular horror film monsters, yet shark attacks on humans in real life are extraordinarily rare. Much of this inaccurate, damaging image of human- eating great whites is traceable to Jaws (1975), which David Ingram argues may be seen as a cinematic backlash against rising 1970s environmental concerns (Green Screen 89). Jaws and other shark attack films negatively impact public opinion about great white sharks, popularizing portrayals of shark behaviors that “necessitate the conquest and killing” of sharks, both on film and in reality (90).

The Shallows (2016) and 47 Meters Down (2017) feature blonde women protagonists fighting for their lives against great white sharks. In Richard Dyer’s terms, these human heroines are “ordinary” white while the great white sharks they fight are “extreme” white. “Extreme whiteness coexists with ordinary whiteness” and is what “non-extreme, unspectacular, plain whiteness” aspires to – yet also fears (White 222). Ordinary whites hold extreme whiteness – the white race’s horrible capacity for cruelty and death – “at a distance,” refusing to see their complicity with it.

Thus these two shark attack films fulfill an American imperialist function, normalizing American white women ecotourists at the expense of villainized great white sharks whose habitat the former invade. In both films, set in coastal Mexico, a robust site for real-world shark-watching ecotourism, local people of color provide a backdrop, serve as laborers, and even act as a vague xenophobic menace toward the American protagonists. Through their monstrous portrayals of killer sharks and predatory Mexicans, these thrillers function as heavily coded neo-colonialist thrillers for the globalized era. They substitute a white female heroine for the traditional male hero yet maintain the Eurocentric pecking order, asserting the white woman’s superiority over nature as well as her non-white and too-white “subordinates” (Ingram 36).

New Critical Realities: Indigenous Filmmaking in the Time of Climate Change

Lisa Bloom

This paper draws on writing done for my current book project Polar Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: Artists and Filmmakers Respond to the Climate Crisis. The book addresses polar art not just as an illustration of planetary demise and a call for action. But as a challenge to our imagination. Much of this work brings into being new forms of seeing, feeling, and sociality, that are connected to living through this kind of slow- moving disaster inflicted by environmental and climate breakdown. How very different these emotions of precariousness are from the old flag-planting heroism of explorations to “the ends of the earth” of an earlier epoch.

This paper focuses on indigenous artists to shift our view of the polar regions from the heroic to the climatic, from the white, male explorer’s perspective of remote wildernesses to the Inuit/Indigenous perspective that frames the land and the people of the land as a mix of human and non-human forces. It focuses on the experimental film, “Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change,” (2010) by Nunavut-based director Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, the first documentary in the Igloolik-based language that explores the grave political realities a Northern indigenous community faces in the context of accelerated climate change. My analysis calls attention to how this film replaces the sublime aesthetic of the polar heroic age with an alternative aesthetic – one that is a counter aesthetic (anti-heroic), that focuses on the everyday (quotidian), and is indigenous (Inuit). The film suggests that it is easier for Euro-American people to elevate the significance of a symbolic polar than to acknowledge Arctic indigenous peoples and their own knowledge system about global warming which is one removed from a statistical perspective and is much closer to home that is quotidian (literally down to earth).

Onscreen Pleasure and Off-Screen Guilt

Erin Espelie

Viewers and artists share a burden of guilt involved in experiencing and documenting landscapes, wildlife, and the degrading environmental status of the planet today, in the Anthropocene. Representations, whether photo-realistic or implied, demand a different level of awareness to what lies beyond the screen—not only what exists beyond the frame, but also what efforts, debates, and effects went into the creation of the images. Moreover, the history of place imbues plein air settings with fraught purpose and new moral complexities of mise-en-scène. Certainly, some artists cope with these dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion by relying on computer-generated scenes or by working within forgiving genres such as speculative or science fiction. Yet the intangible profundities related to the shooting, recording, storing, editing, refinement, and projection of moving-image pieces cannot be denied or fully subverted, thus certain artists have altered their workflows and moving-image practices. The result is a paradigm shift that often demands alternative forms of living, filming, and viewing–linked to the ethics of making. Notably, artists avoid human subjects, and foreground landscapes, as was pioneered by Godfrey Reggio in the Qatsi trilogy, or by focusing on alternative subjects, as in the case of Jean Painlevé. In this presentation, I will draw from my own moving-image works, which combine analog film with high-definition digital, and I will highlight my feature-length experimental documentary, The Lanthanide Series (premiere: CPH:DOX; grand prize Seoul International New Media Festival), shot entirely in reflection of a defunct digital tablet, that eschews the human subject in favor of the geological and otherwise anthropological. I aim to address the ethics of shooting new material, notably with wildlife as subjects, in the context of today’s environmental catastrophes. (The talk would include clips from my own work and from other artists, such as Emily Drummer (Univ of Iowa), Deborah Stratman (Univ of Illinois Chicaco), and Stephanie Barber (MICA).)

Open Educational Resources and Ecomedia Pedagogy: Surveying the Landscape

Dan Platt

Over the past few years, the movement for Open educational resources (OER) has sought to lower students’ textbook costs, create adaptable digital teaching tools, and facilitate collaborations between students and instructors. The development of open textbooks and other open educational resources has been concentrated in areas with high course enrollment and high textbook costs, such as Math and Science. However, there is a growing demand for open resources to serve “niche” courses, such as those in the Humanities, which are taught less frequently (and often without a textbook).

As someone who teaches at a small rural liberal arts college with a high population of under- resourced students, the argument for OER resonates deeply with me. I also believe that creating open resources for the “niche” courses I teach—in Eco-Cinema and the Environmental Humanities—will help to underscore the idea that such courses aren’t luxuries for the privileged few, but should be accessible to all. Over the years, I’ve benefited from excellent digital resources, such as the Ecomedia Studies wiki. However, I believe that there is still an unmet need for open resources aimed at undergraduates in Ecomedia Studies.

In this presentation, I will offer a brief overview of the growth of OER and the challenges that face OER advocates. I will survey the digital resources that are available for instructors in Ecomedia Studies and in the Environmental Humanities more broadly. In the final portion of the presentation, I will examine opportunities for the collaborative creation of an open textbook that could serve a range of undergraduate courses in Ecomedia Studies. Some questions I hope to address are: What shape would an OER Ecomedia Studies textbook take? How might scholars at different institutions collaborate on such a project? What role can undergraduate students play in the construction of these resources?

Black Bodies, White Earth: Mapping a Modern Aeta Consciousness

Toward an Ecocinema of the Philippines 

Rogelio Garcia

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 displaced some 10,000 Aetas, an indigenous group of Asiatic pygmies that inhabits the vicinity of the volcano in Zambales, Philippines. When the Aetas returned to their ancestral domains, the lowlanders have crept into their land and transformed portions of it to ranches, resorts, and private properties. The displacement of the Aetas resulted to complex psychological, socio-cultural, economic, agrarian and political tensions that the Aetas face to this day. These tensions are captured by Manoro (2006), an independent film set thirteen years after the eruption which tells the story of Jonalyn Ablong, a young Aeta woman who teaches her elders to read and write so they can cast their vote at the Philippine national election for the first time. Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza photographs the film in a documentary style that follows the character’s reterritorialization in a terrain covered with lahar (white volcanic ash). Manoro as an avant-garde ecocinema employs minimal directions for acting and dialogue, maximum use of outdoor location and natural light, and casts real non-actor Aetas. Following Jonalyn’s journey through a lahar-covered terrain and the independent film’s journey as ecocinema, the objective of this paper is two-fold. First, it articulates the tensions of the modern Aeta consciousness as embodied by its main character Jonalyn by mapping the post-eruption landscape of Mount Pinatubo as the site of trauma where the black bodies of the Aetas contrast with the earth made white by the explosion of the volcano. Black bodies against white earth is a visual metaphor of the ethnic hierarchy between the Aetas who are highly conscious of their dark complexion, kinky hair, and short stature and the lowlanders that they call “white people”, the negotiations between Aeta traditions with modernity, and the loss of sovereignty over their ancestral domain. Second, this paper highlights the significance of Manoro as a representative work of ecocinema, a categorization that urgently demands critical attention in the Philippines. As Manoro presents a microcosm of the larger environmental and cultural struggles faced by Philippine indigenous communities in the twenty-first century, it grapples against the challenges that an independent avant-garde ecocinema faces in terms of distribution, accessibility, and audience reception.

Living/Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button

Matthew Holtmeier

This presentation discusses the eco-aesthetic strategies of Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button (2015) in relation to the displacement of indigenous populations. In The Pearl Button, Guzmán explores the role water played in shaping how the Selk’nam inhabited the Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia through ‘cosmovisions’ (Joni Adamson), sequences that extend beyond human perception, even as they link the habitation of indigenous peoples to subsequent colonial and political projects. I argue that Guzmán’s “cosmovisual aesthetic” critiques bioregional perspectives, suggesting unique ways in which ecomedia might contribute to larger environmental discourses.

Guzmán’s cosmovisual aesthetic ranges from extreme close-ups to reveal minute details in objects to aerial shots that articulate the shapes of coasts and even to telescopic shots depicting planets and nebulae. He works with archival photography and the superimposition of images/sounds in order to create a pluriverse of peoples and environments, which moves beyond human audiovisual and temporal perception. “Illuminating ‘things’ in the natural world that cannot be seen by the human eye, including multi-scale relationships between species functioning in systems” (Adamson 2014: 181), the film shows “things” vital to Indigenous worldviews. In doing so, it connects how water influenced the ways in which the Selk’nam inhabited Chile, but also the colonial project of Spain in Chile and water’s relationship to the later dictatorship and political murders under Augusto Pinochet.

By illuminating Indigenous presence, The Pearl Button complicates the notion of bioregionalism, which does not critically examine the displacement of indigenous people. Popularizing the term, bioregionalism, Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann extoll the virtues of ‘living-in-place,’ but a return-to-nature narrative emerges, which ignores Indigenous displacement. The Pearl Button illustrates how one might ‘live-in-place,’ but also how the environment relates to displacement, genocide, and political disappearances, acknowledging the diverse and deadly relationships between the human and non-human.

Decolonizing Drones: Aerial Media in the #NoDAPL Struggle

Emily Roehl

In North Dakota, from the summer of 2016 through the winter of 2017, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies set up camps in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In May of 2017, leaked documents revealed that the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, hired private security firm TigerSwan to monitor the actions of water protectors at Standing Rock. Aerial images distributed on social media contributed to TigerSwan’s surveillance of the encampments as well as to the performance of resistance to settler colonial energy development. In recent years, social media platforms like Facebook have been used as digital stages for the performance of resistance, as media makers broadcast actions to remote viewers who watch them unfold through the proscenium frame of a Facebook Live video. This presentation will consider the use of drones in the #NoDAPL movement. Myron Dewey of Digital Smoke Signals used drone video in at least two ways: as evidence of police violence and to document performances of resistance on the ground. While TigerSwan used aerial media as an intelligence tool, Dewey harnessed surveillance technologies to produce counter-optics to the militarization of energy infrastructure struggles, making media that reflected state violence back on the energy companies and mercenaries who enabled that violence. In this presentation, I will compare the tactics and optics produced by TigerSwan and Dewey.

Decolonially Queer: Indigenous Ecocriticism, Queer Ecologies, and Multispecies Relationships in Recent Latin American Film and Art

Vera Coleman

Indigenous communities of Latin America and around the world have for thousands of years developed sophisticated understandings of sexual diversity and gender performativity within and beyond the scope of the human. Ritual shape-shifting practices that traverse species lines and reveal fluid, amorphous sexualities, problematize the Western categorizing regimes that bolster what Walter Mignolo calls the “colonial matrix of power.” Multispecies relationships and artistic forms that blur the boundaries between sexualities and orders of life can help us dismantle patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric discourses around what constitutes the “natural.” Engaging with recent examples of Latin American ecomedia through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on indigenous ecocriticism, queer ecologies, and material ecocriticism, I argue that more-than-human queer performativities help us imagine unexpected landscapes of multispecies flourishing and decolonial environmental justice beyond the inequities of the Anthropocene.

Critiques of the problematic linkages among classification, colonization, patriarchy, and extinction pervade various sculptural installations by Colombian artist María Fernanda Cardoso, whose works uncover indigenous Muisca ritual symbolism and knowledge about sexuality and ecology while materializing overlapping histories of social and environmental exploitation in the northern Andes. In pieces such as Corona para una princesa chibcha and Ranas bailando, Cardoso enacts a sophisticated cultural critique of New World naturalist-explorers’ obsession with collecting and preserving “specimens” while queering the heteronormative semiotics of the natural history museums whose displays those specimens filled. In a similar fashion, in the films El niño pez and XXY directed by Argentine filmmaker Lucía Puenzo, indigenous and queer protagonists denaturalize gender categories and heteronormative constructions of kinship while resisting legacies of colonization and resource extraction in the Southern Cone. In addition to uncovering indigenous Guaraní language and ecological knowledge, Puenzo’s films feature trans-species beings (like the titular “fish child”) that dismantle the tenuous boundaries between culture and nature, male and female, human and nonhuman.

Eco-Testimonies and Eco-Memories in Olosho: Placing Indigenous Ecomedia within the De-/Coloniality of Nature

Felix Mantz

“Many have spoken for us, now we speak for ourselves” are the opening words of the indigenous Maasai film Olosho, which was screened during the 11th Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival 2017 at SOAS University of London. This phrase implies the unequal relations of power underlying problems of Eurocentric narration and the locus of enunciation against which the Maasai have struggled since 1891 and before. Olosho uses Maasai testimony of the ongoing struggles over their ancestral lands against foreign investors and the Tanzanian state by incorporating six representatives from Maasai tribes in Loliondo (Tanzania), who report on new rounds of dispossession and neo-colonialism.

In this paper, I study the decolonial aesthetics of the Maasai narratives in Olosho as explicit examples of eco-testimonies and eco-memories that challenge Eurocentric images of the helpless and inferior indigenous African incapable of agency within the web of global coloniality. In doing so, I draw on decolonial theory and the de-/coloniality of nature, which follows Escobar’s (2008) discussion on the establishment of colonial hierarchies and sub-hierarchies among (Hu)man and Nature, the subordination of different Natures to the white/Eurocentric/rational mind and the attempted destruction of indigenous knowledge systems.

More specifically, I analyze Olosho as part of the “decolonial aesthetic turn,” defined by Maldonado-Torres (2016) as the move away from modern/colonial forms of knowing towards decolonial ways of embodiment, performance, sensing and questioning. From here, I also explore the role of ecomedia within trans-indigenous resistance against the Anthropocene’s multi- dimensional ecological crises, where ecomedia emerges as weapon for the de-/coloniality of nature against intersecting deep structures such as Eurocentrism, coloniality, anthropocentrism, patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism. The decolonial aesthetics of eco-testimonies and eco- memories from Loliondo’s Maasai are a powerful mosaic within the global project for environmental, racial and gender justice which follows de la Cadena’s (2010) call for a pluriversal politics that demands the provincialization of knowledge, the unlearning of a single ontology and the recognition of multiple socionatural world.

Inal Mama: Subjugated Indigenous Knowledges and the Sacredness of the Coca Leaf

Abigail Perez Aguilera

Inal Mama, is the sacred coca leaf for indigenous Andean peoples, including the Quechua, Guarani and Afro-Quechua peoples. The indigenous ecomedia project, Inal Mama (2008) is an Andean documentary feature production by Eduardo López Zavala that follows the lives of different indigenous groups across Bolivia and Paraguay. The ancestral sacredness of Inal Mama is contraposed with the use of the coca leaf for producing cocaine by non-indigenous peoples. As expressed in the documentary, indigenous peoples’ connection to Inal Mama is one based on continuation of life, energy, health, spirituality and the continuation of life. On the opposite side, according to one Guarani leader, Western civilization has made a mockery of the coca leaf by using it for recreational purposes disregarding its sacredness, its relation to indigenous peoples, and its connection to the continuation (and resistance) of Andean culture. Inal Mama addresses how the use of cocaine and the war on drugs in Bolivia goes hand in hand with the subjugation of indigenous peoples in the Andes for the use of the coca leaf. I argue that this indigenous ecomedia piece presents us with two perspectives regarding the coca leaf, one that shows Inal Mama as a non-human agent who is abused, commodified, prohibited and criminalized, and another depicting it as a mother, a nurturer of life which constitutes symbiosis between non- human and human life.

I analyze Inal Mama through an indigenous decolonial, anti-capitalist/imperialist approach. By relying on the works of Lugones (2006); Fausto Reinaga (1978; 1979; 1974), Marisol de la Cadena (2008;2010) and indigenous Andean feminist approaches such as those of Rivera Cusicanqui (2010; 1986) and Julieta Paredes (2011), I provide a decolonial analysis of Inal Mama, an indigenous ecomedia piece, using Global South theories of nature, gender, imperialism and Global South-North relations. As presented in Inal Mama, the use of the coca leaf is an essential part of indigenous identity and revitalization of indigenous knowledge systems. Hence, the coca leaf becomes a non-human person within indigenous Andean cosmopolitics as shown in Inal Mama. With this analysis, I consider decolonization as a socio- political ongoing project in the Andes against slow violence and a monumental modernity.

Praise Your Capacity: Oceania, the Anthropocene, and Craig Santos Perez’s Videopoems

Rebecca Hogue

Both Indigenous studies and ecocriticism have long centered on land—on its dispossession, destruction, and dynamism. But what about water, or more specifically, the ocean? Water Protectors at Standing Rock powerfully exclaimed “Water is Life,” “Mni Wiconi” and gathered millions of followers to advocate for water protection. However, in the Pacific Ocean, and other places in the world with low-lying atolls, in this time of climate change, water does indeed bring life, but it also brings death. Sea level rise, coral bleaching, and salinization changes threaten the oceanic ecosystems that have sustained life on the Pacific Islands for millennia. Now, as a region long beleaguered by Western narratives of tranquility or passivity, Indigenous artists of Oceania are turning to visual media to rectify these erasures and provide witnesses, in the words of Rob Nixon, of “sights unseen.”

In a timely example, Chamarro poet Craig Santos-Perez’s 2017 videopoem “Praise Song for Oceania,” renders the ocean storyteller and wayfinder. Here he utters the names of the ocean from across Oceania’s great expanse: “tasi & kai & tai & moana nui & vasa & / tahi & lik & wai tui & daob & wonsolwara.” Representing the ocean from Guåhån to Hawaiʻi to Aotearoa to Samoa to Tonga to Fiji to Belau to Papua New Guinea, Santos-Perez navigates the Pacific through the undulating body that joins each of these lands together. Moreover, in Santos-Perez’s videopoem “Halloween in the Anthropocene” (2016) his speaker, painted in a horrifying mask, traverses the globe while examining the tricks and treats of late capitalism, and demonstrates the ocean’s gifts alongside its harms. These videopoems demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Oceania’s metaphorism and materiality within the anthropocene, and have been shown at a variety of film festivals across the globe. This presentation will advocate for the importance of visuality alongside the narratological and historiographic rewriting of Oceania amidst the impact of climate change.

The Ecology of Media Objects: Teaching Ecomedia with the Ecomedia/sphere Heuristic

Antonio Lopez

Teaching ecomedia entails going beyond traditional textual analysis, requiring that we apply a more holistic approach that allows for the ecological exploration of media objects. In this paper, I will introduce an integrative method of analysis I devised called the “ecomedia/sphere.” The ecomedia/sphere heuristic is a figurative map that embeds media objects within a greater ecosystem of “spheres” (bio-, ethno-, semio-, info-, etc.). At the center of the ecomedia/sphere (visualized in 2-D as a circle divided into four sections), we situate a media object, which can be a media text (such as an advertisement, news article, television commercial, website, film, etc.) or gadget (smart phone, tablet, computer, etc.). Modeled on the concept of a boundary objects, a media object is something that has mutually recognizable form but changes meaning according to context. Subsequently, learners are asked to explore the media object’s use and meaning from four different media/sphere perspectives: lifeworld, eco-materialist, political economy, and culture. Conceptually and theoretically, these four perspectives correspond with various lenses that inform media studies and environmental studies. For example, we all agree the media object, Blade Runner 2049, is film released in 2017. But the film has different meanings and uses to the audience, critics, crew, actors, marketers and studio that produced it. From a lifeworld perspective, the film is examined based on the “ecocinema experience” of the audience. The eco- materialist perspective explores the physical properties and impacts of the film on the environment. The political economy assessment approaches the film as a global media product and commodity. The cultural approach examines the film’s discourses, narratives and cultural themes in relationship to ecology. Like cultural studies’ circuit of culture model, all these spheres interact with each other and are iterative. The goal is for learners to take any media object and to contextualize it within an interconnected ecosystem of human and more-than-human dimensions.

The Future is Wild: Speculative Evolution and the Post-Anthropocene

Anne Schmalstig

The BBC/Discovery Channel documentary series The Future Is Wild (2003) and Alan Weisman’s nonfiction The World Without Us (2007) both imagine an Earth devoid of humans, where different species dominate. Weisman considers how cities, forests, human-made products, and animals will survive without us. His extensive research and interviews with evolutionary scientists lead him to conclude, for example, that megafauna would flourish and traces of human civilization would be quickly subsumed by unbridled vegetation and silt from rising waters. The Future Is Wild similarly draws on the expertise of biologists, geologists, and paleontologists to imagine how current species would adapt, mix, and evolve in new environments created by global warming and cooling that, ignoring the rapid climate changes occurring in the Anthropocene Age, would normally have occurred 5, 100, and 200 million years from now.

Weisman’s book has received criticism for its casual dismissal of humanity without accounting for how humans will disappear and what environmental and social damage they will do in the process. I will examine both texts’ positionings beyond humanity and Anthropocenic climate change, but I will especially focus on the nonfiction and documentary strategies that both texts employ to make their narrative leaps into a human-less future. The Future Is Wild is particularly interesting in that it situates itself in the future with digitally created videos of futuristic hybrid animals like “flish”; these are filmed in a nature-documentary style with follow shots and close- ups on the animals, but are narrated via voiceover in the future tense. Positioning these wild animals both as “plausible” and completely fabricated, The Future Is Wild walks a fine line between documentary and fiction while omitting how humans will and are already impacting real species in existence today. Ultimately, this paper will critique the utility of speculative evolution and docufiction in ecocritical discourse.