Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus invites submissions for a special themed issue:

Image: KC Green. Alt text: A cartoon dog in a small hat sits calmly in a wooden chair at a dining table while flames and smoke consume the room.

As the World Burns: On Media and Climate

Guest Editors: Corinna Kirsch, PhD (Pratt Institute) and Rebecca Uliasz (Duke University)

Deadline for abstracts: Monday, July 31, 2023

For this special issue of Media-N, the editors invite abstracts on topics related to the history, theory, and aesthetics of digital media and climate. 

We hope to shed light on the long history of digital art and media’s participation in planetary processes connected to climate change, including the challenges posed by new media art’s ongoing culpability and participation in its advancement, and the overarching effects of these actions on social, perceptual, and cognitive registers, both globally and individually. Through this form of eco-criticism, we approach two acute developments faced today, each bearing enormous and unevenly distributed threats to a globalized world: climate change and the proliferation of data-driven technology across nearly every social sphere. We also seek alternatives to climate discourse’s hyper-focus on present-day structures by appealing to deep histories and non-western approaches to the ambiguous interconnection of media and “nature.” In so doing, we see that the relationship between media and climate is not a new situation by any means, nor is it a universal one: the Anthropocene began prior to this century, with geological shifts recorded at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and, even further back, to the European colonization of the Americas. As Andreas Malm has put it, “We can never be in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of this ongoing past.” 

Questions informing the special issue include: In what ways are new media scholars, activists, and artists engaging with the Earth-altering processes of technology? How have practitioners, scholars, and activists working with digital media illuminated the way agency, subjectivity, and environment is defined and operationalized in diverse geo- and socio-political contexts? What alternatives might be sought through appealing to indigenous and other forms of climate knowledge, cultivated by communities that have long found themselves subjected to colonially-induced climate change? As a method of promoting cross-disciplinary conversation among the new media community, we are seeking project reports, exhibition and event reviews, interviews, and manifestos in addition to formal research papers. 

Topics of potential interest to the editors include, but are not limited to:

• Questions related to weather, climate, and digital infrastructures
• Weather and meteorology in media and systems-based practices, e.g., climate control in museums, solar powered art, and media projects with natural radio
• Relation between media aesthetics and environmental “injustices,” e.g., eco-fascism and climate-change denialism 
• Elemental, thermal, atmospheric, infrastructural and other forms of media that aren’t exclusively digital
• Non-western and indigenous histories and theories of art, digital media, and the environment
• Environmental media and digital or financial capitalism, e.g., blockchain, algorithmic forecasting, and predictive simulations
• Climate fiction, futurities, and imaginaries, including multi-species assemblages
• Environmental media and digital colonialism and neocolonialism 
• Labor, subjectivity, and psychic dimensions of environmental media

To submit an abstract for consideration, please send 200-300 word abstracts and a condensed (under 5 pg.) CV to the following individuals by Monday, July 31, 2023:

• Guest Editor, Corinna Kirsch: corinna.kirsch@gmail.com
• Guest Editor, Rebecca Uliasz: rebecca.uliasz@gmail.com
• Interim Executive Editor, Chelsea Thompto: chelsea.l.thompto@gmail.com 
• Executive Editor, Johanna Gosse: johannagosse@gmail.com 
  

Final Submission Length Guidelines:

• Articles: 6,000-8,000 word range
• Artist's projects: 4,000-6,000 word range
• Interviews and Reviews: 1,000-3,000 word range