Image, Ecology, Ethics

Course leaders: Associate Professor Øyvind Vågnes, and Professor Asbjørn Grønstad, both at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, UiB

The objective of this course is twofold, and the seminars will be organised around two related, yet distinct thematic nodes: "Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies" and "Visualising the Anthropocene.

"In "Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies" we will invite discussion concerning the ethical urgency of what Sean Cubitt describes in Finite Media as an eco-political media aesthetics, in which the reorientation of our use of media enables a shift in our relationship to the environment. 

Then, in "Visualising the Anthropocene," we will examine the diverse ways in which images from a range of different media imagine and depict ongoing transformations in the interconnected spheres of ecology and ethics. This will include discussions of how visual representations may intervene in environmental deliberations, for instance through the process that visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff has referred to as “visualising the Anthropocene.”

Speakers for lectures, roundtables, group discussions

Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths University of London
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
Nina Lager Vestberg, NTNU
Asbjørn Grønstad, University of Bergen
Øyvind Vågnes, University of Bergen
Synnøve Marie Vik, University of Bergen

Required reading

Cubitt, Sean, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, Introduction, chapters 3 and 4. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. (54 pages)

Maxwell, Richard, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg (eds.), "Introduction: Media Ecology Recycled" in Media and the Ecological Crisis. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. (20 pages)

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture, 26.2 (2014): 213-232. (19 pages)

LeMenager, Stephanie. "Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief," in Imre Szeman & Dominic Boyer, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017: 470-486. (16 pages)

Morton, Timothy. "A Quake in Being," in Imre Szeman & Dominic Boyer, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017: 357-372. (15 pages)

Zylinska, Joanna, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, Open Humanities Press, 2014. (152 pages)

Recommended reading

Szeman, Imre & Dominic Boyer, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: John   Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Course leaders

Asbjørn Grønstad is founding director of Nomadikon: The Bergen Center of Visual Culture. He is professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. Among his most recent books are Film and the Ethical Imagination (Palsgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson & Øyvind Vågnes, Routledge, 2016). He has authored numerous articles across a range of disciplines such as cinema studies, American Studies, and visual culture. Grønstad is also, with Øyvind Vågnes, a founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture, whose first issue appeared in 2010, and he is on the editorial or advisory board of several journals, including Photomediations Machine, ABC, and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. Currently a visiting Fulbright professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Grønstad is working on a new book project tentatively entitled Figures of Opacity in Visual Culture.

Øyvind Vågnes has been affiliated with Nomadikon: The Bergen Center of Visual Culture since its opening in 2008. He is associate professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. Vågnes has published widely; among his most recent publications are Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (co-edited with Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson, Routledge, 2016), and several articles including, most recently, "A Day in History: Andrea Gjestvang's 22 July Photographs," in Journal of European Studies (47.3.2017). Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture (University of Texas Press, 2011) earned him a nomination at the PROSE Awards (Professional and Scholarly Excellence, presented by the Association of American Publishers) and the Peter C. Rollins Book Award in 2012. With Asbjørn Grønstad Vågnes is a co-founder of the journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture. Also a writer of fiction, he published Vesaas (Tiden Norsk Forlag), his fifth novel, in September 2017.