ABSTRACT

Sustainable Media explores the many ways that media and environment are intertwined from the exploitation of natural and human resources during media production to the installation and disposal of media in the landscape; from people’s engagement with environmental issues in film, television, and digital media to the mediating properties of ecologies themselves. Edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, the assembled chapters expose how the social and representational practices of media culture are necessarily caught up with technologies, infrastructures, and environments.Through in-depth analyses of media theories, practices, and objects including cell phone towers, ecologically-themed video games, Geiger counters for registering radiation, and sound waves traveling through the ocean, contributors question the sustainability of the media we build, exchange, and inhabit and chart emerging alternatives for media ecologies.

chapter |20 pages

Introduction

Sustainable Media

part |72 pages

Resource Media

chapter |15 pages

500,000 Kilowatts of Stardust

An Ecomaterialist Reframing of Singin' in the Rain

chapter |18 pages

Pipeline Ecologies

Rural Entanglements of Fiber-Optic Cables

chapter |21 pages

Making Data Sustainable

Backup Culture and Risk Perception

chapter |16 pages

“There Ain't No Gettin' Offa This Train”

Final Fantasy VII and the Pwning of Environmental Crisis

part |68 pages

Social Ecologies, Mediating Environments

chapter |18 pages

Mediating Infrastructures

(Im)Mobile Toxicity and Cell Antenna Publics

chapter |15 pages

The Lack of Media

The Invisible Domain post 3.11

chapter |15 pages

“Going the Distance”

Steadicam's Ecological Aesthetic

part |52 pages

(Un)sustainable Materialities

chapter |17 pages

So-called Nature

Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media Materialism

part |67 pages

Scaling, Modeling, Coupling

chapter |17 pages

Think Galactically, Act Microscopically?

The Science of Scale in Video Games

chapter |16 pages

Toward Symbiosis

Human-viral Futures in the “Molecular Movies”

chapter |16 pages

Coupling Complexity

Ecological Cybernetics as a Resource for Nonrepresentational Moves to Action

chapter |17 pages

The Invisible Axis

From Polar Media to Planetary Networks