This research cluster was part of The Seed Box first phase 2015 - 2019.
The media infrastructures and digital networks of the 21st century has transformed the environment in drastic ways, making it necessary to describe and analyze new media ecologies. New media have, like nothing else, transformed life in the 21st century. The ubiquitous presence of digital technologies – ranging from optical fiber networks and a geography of server halls to sensor topographies, cellphones, wearables, and implants – define more and more the conditions of everyday life, and have had enormous environmental, epistemic, economic, aesthetic, political, and social consequence.
A new ecology of bodies, discourses, and machines has emerged, which demands a description and an analysis that re-considers the technical artifact and explores the boundaries between humans and their surroundings. Nature and culture are always intertwined and merged, e.g. minerals become components in digital hardware and circulate in society before eventually turning into e-waste, once again mixing with water and earth.
This also makes it possible, even feasible to approach ‘natural’ phenomena as media, especially if we consider media as something “providing conditions for existence” and as “infrastructures and forms of life” rather than as simple channels for communication, to quote John Durham Peters. Such a perspective can offer new accounts and narratives of our dealings with the environment – new ‘environmental imaginaries’ – that expand and transform the stories of nature.
Such and related issues are addressed and analyzed in the research area Media Ecologies in The Seed Box Program. For further reading about the research area and its projects, see below.
Projects
Publications
Social Inclusion, Digital Tools and GamificationKeynote Speaker by Holloway-Attaway, Lissa
Gaming as a Tool for Learning and Connecting CulturesStage performance by Holloway-Attaway, Lissa
Re-membering Voices and Making Manifest Melville’s Others: a Performative Reading with Digital AccompanimentSeminar by Cameron, Fiona
Museum collections as more-than-human things: The case of the green plastic bucketLecture by Fuller, Matthew
Investigative AestheticsLecture by Heise, Ursula
Planet of Cities: Urban Environments and Narrative FuturesWorkshop by Gren, Jonas; Sigvardsdotter, Erika
The Return of BacteriaWeb Portal by Árnason, Þorvarður; Steven Hartman; Joni Adamson; Anders Birgersson; Peter Norrman & Lea Rekow
BifrostBook by Åsberg, Cecilia and Braidotti, rosi
A FEMINIST COMPANION TO THE POSTHUMANITIESBook by Olsson, Jesper
Spaceship, Time MachineArticle by Olsson, Jesper
Omänskliga historierArticle by Olsson, Jesper
Flöden, strömmar, diken: anteckningar om litteratur och infrastrukturLecture by Olsson, Jesper and Ghent University
More-Than-Human Media Ecologies – in Radiophonic Poetry, Sound Poetry, Text-Sound, and Sound ArtSeminar by Hamilton, Jennifer and Olsson, Jesper
Seminar on InfrastructureConference by Jørgen Bruhn and Ida Bencke
Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial PracticesBook by Jørgen Bruhn and Ida Bencke
Multispecies Storytelling Across MediaLecture by Langa, Maria
Aesthetic Environmentalism: The Play Value of Nature in Urban Gardening PracticeArticle by Asp Frederiksen, Lene
Colonial media ecologies – Resounding the colonial archive with impressions from a field trip to GhanaSeminar by Asp Frederiksen, Lene
Colonial Media Ecologies – Entanglements of Colonial Environments