Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

What are the planetary burdens of media technologies? And what cultural and aesthetic frameworks shape how nature is depicted on screen? 

The international symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis confronts the question of how media both represent and materially transform the natural environment in a warming world.

Prominent speakers from three continents will present the latest research on topics ranging from the materiality of film and the finitude of resources to images of extraction, film archives, the colonial and environmental history of photochemical cinema, media’s role in the environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration, and the ecological footprint of digital screen culture and artificial intelligence.

Are you interested in media studies, environmental humanities, science, technology, history, or the arts? Whether you are a scholar, student, practitioner or simply curious, this symposium invites you to join us in rethinking media’s planetary footprint from the archive to the algorithm, from screen to stream.

Among the speakers are:

Michelle Henning
University of Liverpool

Elena Past
Wayne State University, Detroit

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
University College London

Fieke Jansen
University of Amsterdam

Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna
University of Lodz

Hunter Vaughan
Emerson College, Boston

Wu Chi-Yu
Media artist, Taipei

Salomé Lopes Coelho
Utrecht University

Anne-Katrin Weber
University of Lausanne

Ryo Okubo 
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

María Vélez-Serna
Independent scholar

Sigrid Kannengießer
University of Münster

Ischa Borger
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Tessa Holscher
Utrecht University

Valentina Ochner
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Jasper Snoeren
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Alex de Vries-Gao
Digiconomist / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Tobias Wilbrink
GreenScreen Netherlands

The symposium is jointly organized by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Chair in Media and Culture and the Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam.