Green Visual & Cultural Studies
Over
the past 15 years or so, ‘ecocriticism’
has established itself reasonably well
within
literary scholarship. But it has yet to do so in the other arts. What
would a ‘green’
film and visual scholarship look like? It may ask questions of the
relationship
between visual representation and social and ecological reality (such
as Gregg
Mitman’s and Derek
Bouse’s studies of wildlife documentary); it may seek to delineate
‘positive’
versus ‘negative’ images of nature, of environmental activism, and of
human-environment relations (see David
Ingram’s Green Screen); or it
may probe
both the limitations and potentials offered by film and visual media –
including the potential to expand awareness, empathy, and understanding
across
species and across socio-ecological cultural differences (see Scott
MacDonald's The
Garden
in the Machine, Jonathan Burt’s Animals
in Film,
and recent work on
ethnographic cinema, ‘cultures of vision,’ etc.). It would deal with
what Andrew Ross has called "images of ecology" - those familiar images
of "belching smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical sludge, fish
floating belly-up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and
clearcut forests; on the other hand, the redeeming repertoire of
pastoral imagery, pristine, green, and unspoiled by human habitation,
crowned by the ultimate global spectacle, the fragile, vulnerable ball
of spaceship earth" (Andrew Ross, Chicago Gangster Theory of Life,
p. 171) -- but also with the "ecology of images," that is, the ethics,
politics, economics, and 'ecologics' of the ways images are produced,
circulated, and consumed in our society. The latter might best be
thought of as consisting of three interconnected dimensions or levels:
the material, the perceptual, adn the social. Cinema's (and
photography's) material ecologies, or its ecologics,
concern the technologies by which images are made and the ecologies
from which resources are extgracted to make them, and to which waste
materials return following their use. Its perceptual ecologies, or epistemologics,
concern its effects on perception and on culture, including changing
aesthetic and visual cultures as these affect and shape philosophies
and ideologies relating humans to the nonhuman world. Finally, its
social ecologies concern questions of differential access ro production
(including its production costs in human and environmental health),
consumption, and interpretation and control.
Green film studiesGreen visual studies- Spaces
at an Exhibition: Immersive Passages through Central/Eastern European
Identities, Занурення/Zanurzenie/Immersion
exhibition catalogue, ed. Jerzy Onuch (Kyiv, Ukraine: Centre for
Contemporary Art), pp. 11-19. Ukrainian
version reprinted in Krytyka
VII (12), 2004, on-line version.
- Sustainable
Vision, or the Art of Seeing Gracefully, Natural Grace
exhibition catalogue, Amy E. Tarrant Gallery, Flynn Center for the
Performing Arts, Burlington VT/International Sustainable Communities
Conference (2004).
Music & soundscape studies- De/composing (in) the Postmodern Soundscape: Ruminations on
Music-making between Global Capital and Ecotopia, Musicworks 64
(1996), 26-31.
And see the web site for my course Ecopolitics & the Cinema.