Media and the Environment

How are environmental issues represented in various media, from cinema and television to videogames, VR, and experimental art? And how are these media themselves involved in environmental change? In this course, we look at media and the environment as interlocking parts of a system, inseparable from one another. We might start by asking how, for example, documentary and narrative films portray environmental crises like oil spills, wildfires, or extinction events. From there, however, we will need to investigate the ways that media themselves constitute environments, both metaphorically and literally. We swim in media; it is the air we breathe. Virtually all of our experience and communication take place within the spaces of media. Meanwhile, media-technologies and their infrastructures are increasingly entangled with the material environment: from rare earth metals in our electronic devices to undersea cables that bring us the Internet, digital media in particular are an increasingly significant driver of environmental change. In addition to reading and engaging with a variety of media objects, students will have the opportunity to create their own media objects (video essays, VR projects, experimental artworks, etc.) that shed light on the interrelations of media and the environment.