Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

What is the planetary footprint of media technology?

The two-day symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam brings together some of the most prominent voices in the global debate surrounding media’s entanglements with the living world.

Join us for talks and Q&As on how media shape, record, and strain our environments. Speakers from three continents will present the latest research on themes ranging from the colonial materiality of film and operative images of extraction to film archives in a warming world, media’s role in the environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration, and the ecological footprint of digital screen culture and artificial intelligence.

Whether you are interestd in media studies, environmental humanities, STS, history, or the arts – and whether you are a scholar, student, practitioner, or simply curious – this symposium invites you to rethink media’s planetary footprint from the archive to the algorithm, from screen to stream.

By bringing into conversation an international cohort of scholars, artists and students whose work is rooted in distinct methodologies and ecological contexts, the symposium serves as a platform for a more globally attuned research agenda on media and environmental futures.

Confirmed speakers

The symposium program is currently being finalized. More speakers and the full program will be announced soon.

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson

University College London

Sigrid Kannegiesser

University of Münster

Ryo Okubo 

Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna

University of Lodz

Elena Past

Wayne State University, Detroit

Hunter Vaughan

Emerson College, Boston

María Vélez-Serna

Independent scholar

Anne-Katrin Weber

University of Lausanne

Wu Chi-Yu

Media artist, Taipei

Follow the event website mediaenv.ehc-amsterdam.nl for more information.

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