Imaginary Natures: On Extractive Media and the Cultural Memory of Environmental Change

Application summary

The proposal examines environmental change through citizen engagement with advanced imaging technologies. Through field expeditions in the Nordic-Baltic region, the proposal seeks to assemble an intelligent archive of environmental and cultural memory. Combining theory and practice, wild habitats and media infrastructures, machine learning and archival methods, it engages memory institutions with the representation of environmental change. What are the ecological entanglements of media technologies with memory and representation? How does one represent environmental change? Could an excavation of visual practices along with an awareness of the political economy of media inform a methodology for the representation of cultural and environmental memory? How could the technologies of deep seeing, machine learning and analysis, in other words, depth’s technical capacities be re-oriented towards opening up new ways of environmental thinking? How does this affect society’s knowledge of entangled geographies and comprehension of environmental change? The proposal aims to synthesize learning outcomes from literature, participatory field studies and archive co-construction into working principles for media, cultural and environmental research. These principles will lead to a multi-disciplinary social, cultural and digital framework and may offer novel methods and resources towards environmental awareness for society.