Call for Practice – Screenworks special issue: Digital Ecologies and the Anthropocene

This special issue of Screenworks, the online publication of practice-research in film and screen media, invites all practice researchers with an interest in Digital Ecologies and the Anthropocene to submit works that explore the multiple interpretations and intersections of these themes.

Contemporary technologies are crucial in enabling human life and culture to function as well as realising the production and distribution processes of capital. They provide us with useful tools for visualising processes such as climate change and tracking the earth’s own movements or seismic activity but also depend on material realities, consisting of complex meshes of human and non-human moving parts with their own environmental implications. Today’s digital machines are heavily dependent on the extraction of raw materials, the use of fossil fuels and the production of material waste at sites such as Guiyu, China which has been called ‘the electronic graveyard of the world’.

Histories of the internet and current pervasive media technologies also closely relate to the study of the earth and ecological observations. Emerging from the development of military and nuclear technologies, the conception of cybernetics and the design of self-governing computer systems with inbuilt feedback loops – these machines and systems can be approached as actors within a complex mesh of networks, hyperobjects, production processes, waste disposal and notions of deep time. Discussing possible responses to these conditions Christophe Bonneuil describes the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ as a space for generating new political arguments, new modes of behaviour, new narratives, new languages or new creative forms and this special issue of Screenworks seeks to bring some of these emerging discourses to the surface through practice-research work.

This call for practice follows a symposium of the same name hosted by the Media Convergence Research Centre at Bath Spa University and will be edited by guest editors Charlie Tweed (Bath Spa University), Joshua McNamara (University of Melbourne) and Screenworks associate editor Alex Nevill (University of the West of England).

The deadline for submissions is 30th September 2017, extended deadline for submissions is 9th October 2017, for publication in January 2018 (TBC).

Submissions must comprise of two parts: 1) the practical work/documentation itself, preferably as a Vimeo URL provided in the submission form; and 2) a 2000-word Research Statement, using the Submission Form available on the Screenworks website. Completed submissions and enquires for the editorial team should be sent to: [email protected].

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