This collection examines how activism, media, and creative practices shape our understanding of the climate crisis. Bringing together perspectives from media studies, environmental humanities, and artistic research, Confronting the Climate Crisis: Activism, Technology and Ecoaesthetics explores how digital technologies, protest movements, and ecoaesthetic interventions influence ecological discourse. Fifteen chapters interrogate a range of case studies, from student activism and climate-related art to the role of video games, memes, and machine learning in framing and comprehending environmental collapse. The collection also considers how experimental cinema, podcasts, and documentary practices can move beyond entertainment and spectacle to foster lasting and meaningful action against environmental change. Highlighting the intersections of politics, technology, and aesthetics, this book offers a vital resource for scholars, artists, and activists seeking to navigate and challenge contemporary climate narratives. It argues that creative and technological interventions are essential to rethinking our relationship with the planet and shaping new modes of ecological action.

Explores the climate crisis using digital media, visual arts, photography, and filmmaking perspectives, amongst others Offers an interdisciplinary response to catastrophes threatening the planet Explores how to maintain focus on environmental issues in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic

Autorentext

Daniel Binns is a tinkerer-theorist exploring technology's impact on storytelling and media cultures. A leading scholar on digital creativity and media transformation, Daniel has published on AI-generated media, Netflix documentary style, drones, game engines, and the evolution of media genres including the war film and superhero media.

Rebecca Najdowski is an artist-researcher exploring how we visualise climate change through imaging technologies. Through experimental approaches to photographic media, Rebecca investigates the mediation of ecological systems and environmental transformation. Her creative research uses analog experimentation, 3D photogrammetry, and generative AI to build frameworks that question conventional representations of nature.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Navigating Catastrophe: Mapping Climate Crisis Responses Through Technology, Values, and Creative Practice.- Section : Protest and Progress: Activism & Ecopolitics.- Chapter 2: Teaching sustainable development: On systemic issues and fake excuses Chapter 3: Greta Thunberg and the body of politics: How young climate change protesters are reminding us of the gift of materiality.- Chapter 4: The medium is the environment COP26 memes as hypocritical resistance.- Chapter 5: Engendering care for the environment through podcasts.- Section 2 Ecoaesthetic Practice & Analysis.- Chapter 6: A Close Reading of Climate-related Art: Aesthetics and Creative Engagement with the Structural Causes of the Climate Crisis.- Chapter 7: Networked Photography and the 'Image That Comes'.- Chapter 8: Losing Our Heads: Finding Bodies in the Digital Anthropocene through Contemporary Painting Practice.- Chapter 9: Invisible Threats and Materialist Visibilities: Degradations by James Schneider and Quiet Zone by Karl Lemieux and David Bryant.- Chapter 10: Noticing landscape, sensing climate: Extending ecocinema through expanded documentary.- Section 3 Emerging Technological Practices.- Chapter 11: An ecoaesthetic of vegetal surfaces: on Seed, Image Ground as soft montage.- Chapter 12: Speculative Visions: Machine Learning, Photography and the Climate Crisis.- Chapter 13: Wasted Bodies Against Ruined Landscapes: How Mass Effect and The Last of Us Depict The Death of Humanity, But Not Neoliberalism .- Section 4 New Theoretical Horizons.- Chapter 14: Three digressions (on the way to eco-aesthetic politics).- Chapter 15: The Ecological Catastrophe of Algorithmic Individuation: Technological Mediation and its Social Implication in the Age of the Anthropocene.