Imaging Landscapes:
A reading group on the image politics of landscape and visual media. Join us for a 4-part online reading group organised by members of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities PhD Lab.
In the digital age, visual mediations inform and articulate our relationships to landscape, place, and the environment. Multiple forms, modes, and technologies proliferate — drone footage, data visualisation, corporate branding, remote sensing, activist cinema, archival footage, photography, journalism. These visual mediations can work to produce and legitimise extractive relations to the environment or they can enable radical reframings of existing dynamics.
We will explore how these differing visualisations interact and trouble each other. What possibilities might speaking across these diverse forms, modes, and technologies raise for our academic and artistic inquiries? How can we equip ourselves towards ethical and critical modes of witnessing, watching, and receiving visual media by reading, watching, and discussing together?
The first session is titled: ‘From Above’ and will take place on 24th Feb 2-3:30pm.
We will discuss:
- How do corporations and states produce images in aid of quantification, abstraction, and control?
- What escapes the frame in these visual modes?
- How do landscapes become data through data visualisation and sensing technologies?
- How can these tools be used to invert extractive logics?
Texts:
- Kroth, L. (2024). ‘Remote sensing and feminist critique: Reappropriations of sensing across distance.’ Environment and Planning F, 4(1), 3-19. https://journals-sagepub-com.eux.idm.oclc.org/doi/10.1177/26349825241283838
- Forensic Architecture (2021). ‘If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?’ [watch here]
- Parikka, J. & Gil-Fournier, A. (2020). ‘Seed, Image, Ground’: [watch here]
Please contact astacey@ed.ac.uk to be added to the Teams meeting and for PDFs of readings.
