Media and extraction: A brief research manifesto

Self Cite

This short essay is a polemical exploration of recent scholarship on media and resource extraction, with remarks on the necessary revisions this work entails to the purview and practice of studying cinema and media. Drawing on emergent works that elucidate the significance of media’s embeddedness in extractivist logics, we reflect on the ideas that propel them and the future conversations we hope they will provoke. As old disciplinary configurations no longer fit the task of understanding the technological instrumentalization of life in the face of climate breakdown, we consider the ways in which reckoning with modernity’s dependence on extractive industries and modes of labour reformulate media histories, the disciplinary study of media objects, our horizons of thought and our ways of being.

Media and extraction: A brief research manifesto

Jaikumar

Grieveson

2022

Self Cite

The feral film habit of OJOBOCA

Friedling

2023

This essay examines three films and adjacent performance (The Masked Monkeys 2015; Comfort Stations 2018; and Her Name Was Europa 2020) by the Berlin-based filmmaking duo Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy, who together call themselves OJOBOCA. Drawing on the broadly transdisciplinary scholarly treatments and decolonial imperatives of ferality as a site of human and non-human relationality, I contextualize OJOBOCA’s analogue body of work featuring animal subjects as a feral film habit. In describing a feral film habit through OJOBOCA’s work, I also engage a media archaeological concern with making media histories present in practice alongside the complex of aesthetic, ecological, political and economic sensibilities emergent in contemporary photochemical filmmaking and laboratory culture in the (post-)digital age. Overall, my aim is to clarify an experimental project that points towards possible more-than-human cinema-based forms of collectivity and invites novel forms of cinema-based life.

The ecologistics of carbon tracking: Environmental accounting software and industrial media practices

Wiessner

2024

Environmental monitoring and sustainability efforts are increasingly entangled with commercial and industrial software programs. Professionals working to make environmental changes within their industries must articulate their claims in relation to the existing workflows and operational capacities of digitized industry. The use of software to track and quantify embodied carbon costs across the life cycle of timber buildings illustrates this new paradigm of ecologistics, where optimization across supply chains and environmental objectives meet. Describing architects and engineers in the Pacific Northwest of North America who are working to lower the embodied carbon of the built environment, the article theorizes their use and development of software to this end as engaging in a kind of distributed industrial rhetoric. It details how some of these people understand the constitutive impossibility of reducing either ecological complexity or environmental politics to this calculative register, and how, as a result, they self-consciously develop environmental accounting methodologies to transform (rather than merely index) current practices. Neither the logics of capture and interoperability nor normative environmental goals are decisive here. By looking at how they interact, I highlight the role of commercial digital software in structuring how environmentalism is expressed and the role of subjective socioecological concerns in the development of new data infrastructures and methodologies.