The Ecology of Grain (original) (raw)
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Global animal capital and animal garbage: Documentary redemption and hope
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October Magazine, 2017
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Unwinding the Anthropological Machine: Animality, Film and Arnaud des Pallières
2012
This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animality and what the work of contemporary French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in particular can bring to debates around the zoomorphic or ‘creaturely’ dimensions of film. Examining two works by des Pallières — the documentary Is Dead (Incomplete Portrait of Gertrude Stein) (1999) and the feature-length film Adieu (2003) — and drawing principally on the work of Jacques Derrida, the article attends to cinematic, historically-framed configurations of a shared vulnerability between the human and the animal. Such instances of commonality are shown here to unravel hierarchical taxonomies of being, in a rethinking of the ethics and politics of responsibility. These nonanthropocentric modes of cinematic inquiry also engage with issues of minerality and technicity, animating correspondences between forms of life and nonlife, philosophically broadening a consideration of relations between the human and the nonhuman.
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Reaction through art, observed among the 20th century artistic movements, can result in artistic works in which animals are made the object of violence. The objections caused by these works sometimes make people question what art is and its value, and sometimes result in legal interventions. It is the forms of expression in contemporary art where idea gets ahead of physical production. In such an atmosphere, 'philosophy of art activities that question what art is' have become almost equivalent to artistic production. However, the controversial works make the concepts of ethics, law or public influence determine what art can or cannot be. In the background of all these developments, advances in the field of biology blurred the boundaries between animals and humans. After such developments, through which the anthropocentric thought system has lost its power, the position of animals in the system will also change. The reappraisal of animals will fundamentally affect the behavior of the human species towards them, undoubtedly. In such a system where the determinants of the concept of ethics are redefined, objectification of animals will not be ethical as before. In this regard, art can no longer be separated from other fields. When the determinant of the boundaries of art is a non-art field, the discussions within the field lose their meaning. This study aims to investigate the limits of contemporary art by examining the reactions to the selected examples of artists whose ways of including animals in their productions are criticized.
Documentaries without Documents: Ecocinema and Toxins
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"Incommunicable Matter: Writhing Bios and Excess in Traditional Media Ecology"
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When Neil Postman coined the phrase “media ecology” in 1968 he saw it articulating the lived environment as a complex of circulating messages. This representational discourse has been helpful in understanding how humans interacted with the technical media of their time - but the very inclusion of “ecology” in the term hints at biological lifeforces potentially more inscrutable to though no less present in our habitable surround. Early video artists were particularly sensitive to the murky interpenetrations of techno- and bio-ecologies, creating closed circuit television installations teeming with organic entities, for example, Frank Gillette’s Process and Meta-Process of 1973. Slime-molds, tortoises, and tarantulas shared the space with humans and video, but it’s questionable just how many messages were successfully circulating. This presentation aims to show what can be gained (and lost) by folding in the incommunicable to ecology, that writhing activity in excess of human sensoria.
Feral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media
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This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopus’s encounter with a digita...
Ecophilosophy in Contemporary Cinema. Rethinking the Relationship Human-NonHuman Through Film
Film-Philosophy Conference 2018. Gothenburg, Sweden July 3-5, 2018
More than 45 years after the publication of Arne Næss’s article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” in which the Norwegian philosopher postulated the difference between shallow ecology and deep ecology, the human-nonhuman relationship continues to be at the heart of the debate of environmental philosophy. By adopting diverse approaches and moving from anthropocentric, biocentric, or ecocentric perspectives, environmental philosophers have proposed a variety of theories and models trying to identify the fundamental principles and values on which a coherent, adequate environmental ethics must be based. Within this broad and complex scenario, film can express new and more vivid arguments and offer filmgoers many different film worlds in which they can rethink themselves, reflecting on their role in the ecosystem and their relationship with the nonhuman. Moving from film as philosophy and the related concept of the film world, this paper will focus on the cinematic representation of environment and, in particular, on the analysis of the modes of expression of environmental philosophy in contemporary cinema. Through the analysis of the two conflicting movies The Shallows (Collet-Serra 2016) and The Red Turtle (Dudok de Wit 2016), a discussion on expressive forms will be carried out in order to highlight the key aspects of a film ecophilosophy in which the specific mode of relationship between human and nonhuman is raised to the status of philosophical principle.