Sean Cubitt
Working in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Researching ecocritical approaches to the history and philosophy of media and media arts history
Address: Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
UK
Address: Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
UK
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (21)
Uploads
Books by Sean Cubitt
Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro
Datos antropoceno
Tres digresiones
La imagen de massa
La ecocrítica como bien común transnacional
Postumo
Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.
This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/finite-media
While digital media gives us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.
Pia Ednie-Brown, RMIT, Melbourne
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt’s attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Earth-Lambert-Nagle-ebook/dp/B008AK7AV4
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoMedia an enormously important book. A rare combination of ecological and pro-technological thought, his theory of mediation -- of techne as a beneficial communicative device -- suggests that, rather than treat technology as the enemy, we should embrace it as a powerful ally. His case-studies reveal that seeing technology as a positive force could be the key to a non-aggressive form of ecopolitics: that rereading media technologies as communicative devices could help re-establish a physis-polis relationship in areas beyond film."
Holly Rogers, reviewing Ecomedia in Scope
Cine insostenible. Cadenas mundiales de suministro
Datos antropoceno
Tres digresiones
La imagen de massa
La ecocrítica como bien común transnacional
Postumo
Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.
This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/finite-media
While digital media gives us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.
Pia Ednie-Brown, RMIT, Melbourne
Cubitt begins with the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space. He describes Rembrandt’s attempts to achieve pure black by tricking the viewer and the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology, seen in Dürer, Hogarth, and Disney, among others. He finds the origins of central features of digital imaging in nineteenth-century printmaking; examines the clash between the physics and psychology of color; explores the representation of space in shadows, layers, and projection; discusses modes of temporal order in still photography, cinema, television, and digital video; and considers the implications of a political aesthetics of visual technology.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Earth-Lambert-Nagle-ebook/dp/B008AK7AV4
"Cubitt's blend of local and global issues makes EcoMedia an enormously important book. A rare combination of ecological and pro-technological thought, his theory of mediation -- of techne as a beneficial communicative device -- suggests that, rather than treat technology as the enemy, we should embrace it as a powerful ally. His case-studies reveal that seeing technology as a positive force could be the key to a non-aggressive form of ecopolitics: that rereading media technologies as communicative devices could help re-establish a physis-polis relationship in areas beyond film."
Holly Rogers, reviewing Ecomedia in Scope
About the Author"
From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened. The failure of the COP conferences places everyone face to face with just such a terminal event – very possibly the same event that has never ceased since 1492. The challenge is to survive, and to make media and culture, after the end
https://socialtextjournal.org/yes-no-referenda-and-mandates/
By Seán Cubitt, Cristóbal Escobar Duenas and Ben Gook November 14, 2023
The answers to these questions are not the ones commonly imagined and widely bandied about – the common belief that there is no longer any sense in referring to art and technology. We believe that the point of the question is precisely the opposite: today it is necessary, more than ever, to gain a clear understanding of what is meant by art and technology precisely because the boundary between technologies and life have dissolved. Studying the work of artists who operate in this field enables us to acquire vital tools for interpreting our hyper-technological society and grasp the explosive potential of their lateral thinking, including the field of technological and scientific research.