Media-N | The Journal of the New Media Caucus Fall 2021: Volume 17, Issue 2, Pages 27–38 ISSN: 1942-017X

Ecocritical Media Arts and the War on Terra

SEAN CUBITT
Professor of Screen Studies, Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

ABSTRACT

Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically, and aesthetically. But it also recognizes that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal  flux.  Because  of  our  mutual  alienation,  there  are  endless opportunities  for misunderstanding when we capture, store, and process what we confront as Nature. Contemporary economic and political conditions driving ever more terrifying inequalities of wealth and power create the crisis implicit in ecocritique. The critical functions of art, which in these circumstances implies technical and creative aesthetic and political practice, concern the construction of a “we” that embraces the human and non- human victims of ecocide. The master’s tools might dismantle the master’s house, but can they build a different dwelling? Where are the practices that can produce more-than- human social change?