Media and video art practice of the last twenty years coincided with the harrowing expansion of climate degradation. While the effects of climate change had been anticipated before 2000, they took shape ubiquitously and lethally post-2000, bringing new challenges about whether and how to imagine a future for shared life on the planet. These effects coincided also with a deeper historical understanding of how we got here, tracking the history of extractive economies and their imbrication with the forces of gender, race, colonialism, and a human-centered anthropocentricism. This lecture gathers a range of artists and artworks to chronicle the central themes of ecologically-responsive media art practice of the last twenty years, as well as a range of artistic techniques. Ecological effects bring new obstacles to the aesthetic imagination even as they inspire and require that imagining. Time-based media art thus becomes a particularly potent vehicle for addressing the most urgent crises of our time.
Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
Moderated by Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities and and Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University.
The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center is convened by Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University and Sarah Dimick, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.
Image credit: Installation view from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, “If the River Ran Upwards”: Artist Carolina Caycedo, To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise, 2017 and the Serpent River Book, 2017.
LOCATION:Zoom Webinar STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20220217T230000Z DTEND:20220217T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR