How does landscape factor into the production, design, and use of media technologies and infrastructures? How does media shape the way we think about the natural environment? How do we make our media sustainable in an era of climate change?
This course introduces critical, theoretical, and multimodal approaches within media and communication studies that seek to understand the relationship between humans, media technologies, and the environment. Students will learn how the more-than-human world shapes communication technologies, from beacon fires and carrier pigeons to telegraph cables, radio, fiber optics, and satellites.
We will begin the course at the end times, by highlighting the role of media infrastructures in the global ecological crisis. We will then trace our steps back to the beginning, of elemental media. The final creative assignment of the class will be to imagine one’s own set of city infrastructures in a time of planetary crisis. Every class will consist of a robust student-led discussion of the readings, a lecture on the weekly topics, and a media experience (a film, video art, sound or interactive media installation, etc.). Embedded throughout the course will be examples of multimodal scholarship, critical art practice, and activism that aim to interrogate the concerns of each week’s theme. These alternative ways of thinking, organizing, and doing will prompt students to think about the role of media in the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch defined by human impact. Students will visit an E-waste processing site, take an infrastructure tour of University City, participate in creative workshops, and formulate their own multimodal response to the ecological crisis of media today.
Through analysis of mineral extraction, chemical production processes, planned obsolescence, e-waste, the seductive immaterial metaphors of the cloud, Crypto, and AI, the course will encourage conversation around the hidden costs of ubiquitous media devices and the corporate and consumer responsibilities towards reducing the environmental impacts of data.