Sean Cubitt

Does cloud computing have a silver lining

Despite the language of immateriality and weightlessness, network communications have a significant materiality and weight when considered from the standpoint of production, consumption and recycling. In this paper, we concentrate on the energy signatures of the server industry on which internet communications depend, with special consideration of Google server farms. The move towards thin clients and cloud computing raises the stakes for the server farm business, and makes it more urgent to confront the finite environment in which information circulates. We assess recent and near-future growth in server traffic, and suggest that business models and regulatory systems have yet to recognise the challenges they pose.

Distribution and Media Flows

While production, text and audience have been extensively covered by media and cultural studies scholars, the study of distribution is in its infancy. This essay argues that the distributive moment of the media cycle – incorporating delivery to audiences, business-to-business distribution and the redistribution of profits and information derived from audiences – is critical to an understanding of twenty-first-century cultural politics. It offers an analysis of distribution, and considerations on the politics of alternative modes of distribution.

Ecocinema theory and practice

Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves: Defining and Situation Ecocinema Studies Stephen Rust and Salma Monani I. Ecocinema Theory 1. The Eco-Cinema Experience Scott McDonald 2. The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-film Criticism David Ingram 3. Ecocinema and Ideology Andrew Hageman 4. An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image: Cinema as Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine Adrian Ivakhiv II. EcoCinema Practice: Wildlife and Documentary Film 5. Penguins are Good to Think With: Wildlife Films, the Imaginary Shaping of Nature, and Environmental Politics Luis Vivanco 6. Working with Animals: Regarding Companion Species in Documentary Film Jennifer Ladino 7. Beyond Fluidity: A Cultural History of Cinema Under Water Nicole Starosielski 8. Nature Writes the Screenplays: Commercial Wildlife Films and Ecological Entertainment Claire Molloy III: EcoCinema Practice: Hollywood and Fictional Film 9. Hollywood and Climate Change Stephen Rust 10. Appreciating the Views: Filming Nature in Into the Wild, Grizzly Man, and Into the West Pat Brereton 11. Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly in 1970s Rural Slasher Films Carter Soles IV. Beyond Film 12. Environmental Film Festivals: Beginning Explorations at the Intersections of Film Festival Studies and Ecocinema Studies Salma Monani 13. Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism Sean Cubitt

Virilio and New Media

Virilios work as commentator and critic of new media forms takes its inspiration from the urgent need for an ethical dimension to our accommodation of these media in already complex social formations. Although Virilio relies upon a Catholic humanist liberalism and, it is argued here, a very specific mode of philosophical individualism and although these premises govern and constrain the grounding of his ethical critique in a simplistic conceptualization of representation, the article argues that certain facets of his thesis are still worthy of serious contemplation. Virilios scenarios of disempowernment and indifferentiation can be re-read in the light of media theoretical concepts, specifically those concerned with suture, apparatus, dialogue, communication and mediation to provide an ethical aesthetics of the technologization of community.

Visual and audiovisual: from image to moving image

The apparently arcane question of whether an image can move reveals key difficulties concerning the tasks facing visual culture. Among them are the lack of attention to graphic and animated images, to cartography, spreadsheets and databases and other workplace media, and to the relations between image and sound, and image and text. The step from still image to moving image concerns especially the temporal dimension of human communication, a focus too often missing from poststructural analyses. This article argues for the uses of visual cultural analysis in the emergence of new visual practices.

Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies

While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASAs Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

Data Visualization and the Subject of Political Aesthetics

Contemporary digital formalism emerges in the concept of ‘beautiful data’ (Halpern 2015), the visualization of information in intrinsically pleasing patterns which may or may not also provide useful ways of using the data. Data visualization is now both big business and a ubiquitous feature of digital arts and the aesthetic of the ‘postdigital’. It is also a privileged vehicle for the mimetic impulse to re-enter contemporary aesthetic practice, and it is this new formalist mimesis that forms the focus of this chapter.

Virtual Dialectics and Technological Aesthetics

Technology has in general been seen as opposed to humanity: its object, even its enemy. The Grundrisse suggests, however, that technology can be understood as the actualized form of accumulated social knowledge. This actual form can then be understood from the standpoint of a dialectic in which the actual is capable of action only if it can convert its actuality into virtuality, that is to free itself for a future other than its actual present. Critical to this political project is work at the aesthetic level of media and communications technologies.

To transitory peace

•Cultural studies increasingly looks across boundaries. This article looks at definitions of peace from a cultural studies perspective, suggesting that binary oppositions governing such fields as peace and war, individual and society, tradition and modernity offer few grounds for progress towards peace. The article suggests instead that the utopian principle of hope can be recruited for a culture of peace based on the surrender to difference, at a subjective and dialogic level. •

Social Formations of Global Media Art

Abstract The absence of an uninterrupted, lived tradition of critical inquiry into and artistic engagement with technology led to the spread of certain ideologies regarding media or digital media which can be characterised as determinist, instrumentalist and essentialist. Such discourses emerge not only in the myths of cypertopians, but in the practical policies of development projects. Offered as a magic bullet, new technologies have consistently failed the developing world. But the history of social and artistic experiments in new media has also thrown up a number of alternative ways both of conceptualising new media and organising around them. Despite their sixty years of history, ‘new’ media have proved to be adaptable in the hands of innovative and inventive users determined to bend the technology to local requirements. This issue addresses the historical not in an effort to effect a museumisation of new media art, but as a repository of challenges to the naturalised organisation of media, new and old, and the acceptance of them as forces of nature rather than human constructions.