Eco-Art and Ecomedia

Catalog description

Eco-art and ecomedia offer ways to conceptualize ecosystems that are biological, cultural, economic, epistemological, political, social, and, above all, more-than-human. They also foreground potential damage that human activity, including art making and viewing, inflicts on the planet. This class examines how film and video, interactive media, multimedia installation, and visual arts can address issues, such as carbon and pollution trading, earth democracy, digital energy consumption, environmental in/justice, e-waste and waste, extractivism, GMOs and IP, greenwashing and sustainability, habitat degradation, indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge, industrial farming, labor informalization, petroculture, plastics, public health, resource privatization, rewilding, risk assessment, species extinction. The course challenges conventional partitioning of thinking into discrete academic disciplines that normalize anthropocentrism, capitalism, and colonialism to amplify and accelerate overlapping existential crises that affect future generations.