Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

Registrations for the international symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis are closing soon. Register now to join online or on-site at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 26+27 August, 2026.

The symposium features talks, roundtable discussions and film screenings, including:

Elena Past
The Ohio State University

Fire and the Archive: Climate Change, the Mediterranean, and the Istituto LUCE

Michelle Henning
University of Liverpool

Photography’s Broken Contract: Environmental Relations and Technological Imaging

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
University College London

Reverse Engineering Climate Collapse, Or: Doing Film History Backwards

Fieke Jansen
University of Amsterdam

Securing the Market: AI, Predicting Hazards, and Managing Vulnerability

Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna
University of Lodz

Intertwining Scopes: Assessing the Environmental Footprint of an AI-Driven Art Project 

Hunter Vaughan
Emerson College, Boston

Sustainable Digitalisation? The Social Threats and Environmental Costs of a Digital Screen Culture

Anne-Katrin Weber
University of Lausanne

Entangled Flows: Automobility and Television in Postwar Switzerland 

Salomé Lopes Coelho
Utrecht University

Ecologies of Extractive Violence Across Non-Fiction Film

Wu Chi-Yu
Media artist, Taipei

Does Celluloid Dream of Camphor Forests? Colonial Extraction and the Material Prehistory of the Moving Image

Ryo Okubo 
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

Materiality and Finitude: Munesuke Mita’s Theory of Information and Japanese Media Studies

María Vélez-Serna
Independent scholar

Operative Images and Environmental Futures in Extractive Landscapes

Sigrid Kannengießer
University of Münster

Environmental Perspectives on Digital Technologies and AI Infrastructures

Ischa Borger
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Carbon Capture Capitalism: Against the Aesthetics of Profitable Post-Apocalyptics

Tessa Holscher
Utrecht University

‘Whatever is Capable of Breaking our Hearts is also Capable of Moving us to Change’: Invoking the Eco-Eschatology of Honeyland and ‘From Atop a Mountain’

Valentina Ochner
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Big Tech and AI Systems in Global Climate Governance

Jane Tynan
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Waterproof: Cultures of Comfort and Weather Insecurity in the Synthetic Outdoor Apparel Trade 1945-1960

Marek Jancovic
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The Natural Enemy: Chemical Synthesis as Geopolitics on the Example of the Photochemical and Fiber Industries

Jasper Snoeren
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Alex de Vries-Gao
Digiconomist / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Tobias Wilbrink
GreenScreen Netherlands

The symposium also includes a screening of short films:

Stories of Celluloid: Phantom Gaze & Terra Nullius Data
Wu Chi-Yu

Dead Zones
Suzette Bousema

Agrilogistics & Bliss Point
Gerard Ortín Castellví

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