What are the planetary burdens of media technology? What cultural and aesthetic frameworks shape how nature is depicted on screen?
The international symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis confronts the question of how media both represent and materially transform the natural environment in a warming world.
Prominent speakers from three continents will present the latest research on topics ranging from the materiality of film and the finitude of resources to images of extraction, film archives, the colonial and environmental history of photochemical cinema, media’s role in the environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration, and the ecological footprint of digital screen culture and artificial intelligence.
A roundtable brings together perspectives from the media industry, cultural institutions, and archives on how these sectors are responding to the concrete environmental challenges of media tech.
In collaboration with Rialto VU Griffioen, the symposium also features a short film program exploring the extractive history of celluloid, food production, and oceanic dead zones.
Are you interested in media studies, environmental humanities, science, technology, history, or the arts? Whether you are a scholar, student, practitioner or simply curious, this symposium invites you to join us in rethinking media’s planetary footprint from the archive to the algorithm, from screen to stream. Find out more and register on the event website, We hope to see many of you on 26+27 August!
Speakers
Panel 1: analog
Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool): Photography’s Broken Contract: Environmental Relations and Technological Imaging
Elena Past (Wayne State University, Detroit): Fire and the Archive: Climate Change, the Mediterranean, and the Istituto LUCE
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (University College London): Reverse Engineering Climate Collapse: Or Doing Film History Backwards
Panel 2: digital
Fieke Jansen (University of Amsterdam): Securing the Market: AI, Predicting Hazards, and Managing Vulnerability
Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna (University of Lodz): Intertwining Scopes: Assessing the Environmental Footprint of an AI-Driven Art Project
Hunter Vaughan (Emerson College, Boston): Sustainable Digitalisation? The Social Threats and Environmental Costs of a Digital Screen Culture
Panel 3: extraction and acceleration
Salomé Lopes Coelho (Utrecht University): Ecologies of Extractive Violence Across Non-Fiction Film
Anne-Katrin Weber (University of Lausanne): Entangled Flows: Automobility and Television in Postwar Switzerland
Wu Chi-Yu (Media artist, Taipei): Does Celluloid Dream of Camphor Forests? Colonial Extraction and the Material Prehistory of the Moving Image
Panel 4: finitude and futures
Ryo Okubo (Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo): Materiality and Finitude: Munesuke Mita’s Theory of Information and Japanese Media Studies
María Vélez-Serna (Independent scholar): Operative Images and Environmental Futures in Extractive Landscapes
Sigrid Kannengießer (University of Münster): Environmental Perspectives on Digital Technologies and AI Infrastructures
Panel 5: junior scholars
Ischa Borger (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Carbon Capture Capitalism: Against the Aesthetics of Profitable Post-Apocalyptics
Tessa Holscher (Utrecht University): “Whatever is Capable of Breaking our Hearts is also Capable of Moving us to Change”: Invoking the Eco-Eschatology of Honeyland and “From Atop A Mountain”
Valentina Ochner (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Big Tech and AI Systems in Global Climate Governance
Roundtable discussion: Environmental Impacts of Media Tech in Practice
Jasper Snoeren (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
Alex de Vries-Gao (Digiconomist / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Tobias Wilbrink (GreenScreen Netherlands)
Film screening
Stories of Celluloid: Phantom Gaze / Terra Nullius Data (Wu Chi-Yu, 2025)
Dead Zones (Suzette Bousema, 2025)
Agrilogistics / Bliss Point (Gerard Ortin, 2021 / 2023)