“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 8, 2012

Velocities of Ecocriticism 3

Wai Chee Dimock, response. Questions of time frame and the speed of occurrence. The faster something happens the more likely is it to be in the news.

Also a mediating term: the ease with which an event can be transposed into an image, predicated on speed.

Many screens: TV, laptop, cellphone, movie theater. Could be made by many different makers. These different kinds of screen suggest a fairly wide range of possibilities. Different modes and levels of access.

Ursula: animation can do a lot to get us to visualize nonhuman agency and rethink boundaries. How does animation speak to that issue?

Are some of animation's properties capable of being replicated in less technically demanding genres?

Tim: hyperobjects stretch human imagining. The spatial dimensions can be quite small? Plastic bags? Styrofoam. Can we telescope large scale events and turn them into scaled down versions that we can see? (This speaks to my sense of constructivist or object-oriented ecological approaches.)

Maldives underwater cabinet meeting. How does this intervention conjure enough agency to render visible the slow violence? In a non-visual way?

No comments: