ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between ecomedia and new materialist theory, beginning with the premise – shared by both ecomedia and new materialism – that media’s materiality matters as much as its message and that the two cannot be separated. The key elements of new materialism addressed here are Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality and Karen Barad’s agential realism and intra-action, which challenge the sense of the human as separate from the rest of the world and emphasize entanglement and porosity instead. This chapter includes explorations of film representations of these new materialist ideas (how do these ideas appear in ecomedia content?), considerations of how ecomedia is made (what resources are used in creating ecomedia?), and two examples of ecomedia that embody new materialism’s entanglement of meaning and matter: museum taxidermy and Yup’ik artist Peter Williams’ “Inherent Right.” Ultimately, combining new materialism and ecomedia allow us to think differently about our relationships to the nonhuman world and the media we use to understand it, and this chapter argues for the value of this combination while also acknowledging that new materialist concepts echo what has long been present in many Indigenous philosophies.
