Essay Plan 1

Essay Plan

‘Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments’ – West, Richard; Turner, Lynn H. (2014). Introducing Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. pp. 454–472.

"Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” –

Postman, Neil. "What is Media Ecology?". Media Ecology Association. Retrieved 2 Oct 2016.

How does the proposition of an ‘Anthropocene’ impact on new media ecologies?

Introduction

·        context of the Anthropocene and how it may affect our future socio-environmental structures

·        Introduction of new media ecologies – DESIGN THAT TACKLES THE UTILISATION OF NATURE (ecomoderism, tree communication, ecosex, powerplants) vs. TECHNOLOGICALLY NON-ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSIDERED DESIGN (robots, government, cyberspace, petrocapitalism, AI development, Anthropocene maps)

For the Anthropocene

·        The God Species

·        Ecomodernism – a proposal for an ideal Anthropocene

·        Examples of technology that acknowledges natural materials

·        Powerplant (Netherlands Biennale proposal)

·        Leeds Greenhouse

However, these generalise and disavower ‘responsibility for earth-systems disruption, validating further geoengineering experiments, and diffusing political traction in the struggle against climate change’ whitewashing and distracting from the petrocapitalist agendas of our fossil fuel driven society

Commodity Culture

Folding geological time into itself, the technosphere extracts from the sedimented lithosphere the remains of eons-old solar energy, releasing it into the atmosphere. Folding human history into itself, the technosphere extracts from sedimented political arrangements the labour of the bodies of dévaluées: bodies of colour, bodies of women, bodies of the dispossessed.

‘A “necropolitics” to use a term from philosopher Achille Mbembe: the replacement of reciprocity with commodification between humans, and in human relations with the geospheres. The geological effect of a necropolitial technosphere, on a planetary scale, is the Anthropocene.’ Thus presenting the disruption of natural processes for economic gain to satisfy the current globalised capitalist commodity culture.

Such an irrational belief in the power of cement confers uponmodern-minded humans the power to enact upon the earth the transformation of liquid to solid; the division between economicsand ecology; the separation of human activity from ecological andplanetary systems. Outside of space and time, cement is assumedto be immune to tectonics, and impervious to osmosis. It is thisbelief that allows the illusion that exploding and loading 750 chemicals in the subterra—including heavy metals, carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, neurotoxins, and respiratory distressors—will confine them to a particular space, on a specific property, andin a legal territory, even though the planet’s history is that of flowsbetween states of matter, and modern history is that of warfare on enemies in all of their spheres: techno-, atmo-, hydro-, bio , litho. In cement, the geophilosophy of human exceptionalism iscemented: the self-image of moderns is thus denatured, dematerialized, and separated from the planet itself.

·        Plantationocene – concentrating natural produce

·        Homogenocene – industrially induced monocultures, race structures

·        Interconnected natural processes (why we can’t play god)

·        Lesly Green – we made hierarchy, social structures – exploitation of poorer areas to feed the wests development – claiming things that aren’t ours to claim – we assert dominance to gain power through resource gathering

·        Rhode’s Karoo Age – an era of extractive economy that sacrificed life and created sacrifice zones

·        Subterrafuge installation

Petrocapitalism

·        Petrocapitalist Anthropocene – a epoch when “nature is made visible only as ‘natural capital’ in economic trade-offs, or as a backdrop to a techno-optimism that places our collective fate in the hands of markets and technology” – Katrina Forrester

·        The trickledown effect of the fossil fuel industry on our everyday industries

·        How it controls our cultural practices (books, exhibitions, elitism)

·        Indigenous protest

·        Shell spill

·        Beautiful destruction

·        Edward Burtynsky ‘OIL-artist statement’ “The car that I drove cross-country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. I began to think of oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat.”

·        Petrochemical America

·        Timothy Mitchell – “in tracing the connections that were made between pipelines and pumping stations, refineries and shipping routes, road systems and automobile cultures, dollar flows and economic knowledge, weapon exports and militarism, one can see how a particular set of relations was engineered among oil, violence, finance, expertise and democracy” (carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil) (London: Verso, 2011)

·        Heather David, Etienne Turpin – introduction to ‘Art in the Anthropocene’ – “the Anthropocene is not simply the result of activities undertaken by the species Homo sapiens; instead, these effects derive from a particular nexus of epistemic, technological, social, and political economic coalescences figured in the contemporary reality of petrocapitalism’

These agendas are explicitly presented in the VW group sponsorship of the exhibition and book ‘The Future Starts Here’. Touching on revolutionary design underway and in motion, we begin to visualise how our future may take shape. It’s idealisation of the necessity for such innovative and progressive design provides the illusion that it is humanities job to come up with more technologically-based solutions for already vulnerable environments, instead of changing our fundamental societal structures.

The Future Starts Here – questionable motives

·        Military-industrial complex - Aquila

·        The Great Green Wall

·        ONKALO – nuclear geoengineering

·        Tree Antenna

·        Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Thus, instead of blindly adhering to the proposed Anthropocene, with its western driven, lazy and narcissistic generalisations, could alternative geological epochs set in motion a move towards greater climate governance and cultural normalisation.

personification of the environment has been used as a tool to raise public awareness of the way our actions are impacting the planet...climate games...ecosexual bathhouse (compare and contrast)...does this present our social structures as going so far that we have lost total connection to our primitrive beings – we are now ‘intelligent designers’.

Literal VS Lateral methods of getting through to people – which have been more successful?

possibly our best chance of changing our system is changing our perspective on how we view the planet. Chtul considers this approach in another abstract way...making kin...

Alternate propositions to the Anthropocene

·        Capitalocene

·        Chtultocene – making kin not babes

·        Gynoecene – hard left to legitimise a hard right opposition

·        Ecosexual manifesto – bathhouse example

Civil disobedience

The only way to ensure change?

·        Context of Thoreau and Gandhi

·        Climate games

Conclusion

We seem to be in a world that is split between those who value the spirituality and sublimity that lies within our natural environments, and those who believe as sentient beings humanity is in charge of shaping our future. Whilst the former considers the geometry of the world as flows and propensities, the latter trusts that all the resources here on earth are solely for our taking and our development. This fundamental split of perspective, ensures a future we cannot be certain of until it is possibly too late. Through its technological advances and new media ecologies, the future seems to present an uncertain climate, where the separation between humans and the rest of the planet will either grow or harmonise. However, the split between the designers who agree we have entered the age of humans, and those who see the human race as a destructive and exploitative force, damaging a system that has been in place millions of years before us, and will prevail longer, even if it is not in a climate that can support humanities existence, will be the ones to shape it.

-          Depending on the imminent effects of climate change and politicians response will we know the new media ecologies

-          Cyberspace – a growing and overwhelming part of our society – exists invisibly in the air

-          Will there be a womens revolution? It is with civil disobedience that change can and will occur (pussy protests, indigenous grassroots, growth in youthful global climate protest, THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW)

-          It is designs role to ensure we progress with the utilisation of natural materials, and consider the planet as a partner rather than a resource. We get what we give, and we give back to what we get