Sean Cubitt

University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Culture and Communication

Social Text Online https://socialtextjournal.org/yes-no-referenda-and-mandates/

As communications technologies colonise the Mass Unconscious, they also bring the living into closer proximity to the dead, opening new possible alliances. The more dividual humans abandon consciousness in favour of General Cognition, the closer they come to the natural processes that have always permeated their bodies and relationships. When the n...

From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened. The failure (to be pre-emptive) of the COP experiment 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

[Slides for this talk are located under the 'Linked Data' tab below] Supply chains connect materials with manufacture, assembly and consumers. They also are integral to contemporary film production. This paper focuses on the logistical infrastructure of cinema production using the case of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2019), a Netflix produ...

The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthr...

Open access: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003246602

Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects,...

Can the COVID pandemic be understood in any other than ecocritical and decolonial terms? It has brought nothing new except perhaps a certain fatalism in politics, borrowed from eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic visions of migration, the Anthropocene, pestilence, and neo-populism exacerbate longer-term trends. Religious fanatics with machine guns take...

This article suggests that the conditions driving the still-unresolved global financial crisis that began in 2007 depend on a generalised condition of capitalist coloniality that profits from disasters. It proposes that the task of cultural studies is to convert these disasters into crises: critical and therefore history-making opportunities.

Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically, and aesthetically. But it also recognizes that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are end...

This chapter analyses the sites of power implicit in archival ethics. Cubitt proposes that we are now in a position to regard technologies as the congealed form of primordial natural materials and processes, as well as human skills and knowledge. Archives are then technical-ancestral, and ecological, like any capitalist industry. They are also disc...

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This...

COVID-19 is now part of the resources out of which any future must be made. The temptation is to curl back into private misery and fatalism. The opportunity is to further the design of neonationalist, neoliberal returns to pre-1917 norms of extreme wealth, extreme poverty, and unmitigated exploitation of technical and ecological resources. The chal...

This chapter outlines key themes and premises for the discussion of the mass image, the Anthropocene image and image commons. The discussion relates to a range of implications as to the meaning and meaninglessness, location and immateriality, and ecology and abundance of the mass image. At the centre of the discussion is the question of the databas...

Artificial intelligence of Common Intellect?: notes for a conversation between technolgy, ecology and sociology

Introduction pre-proof from the book: Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become, and like them extends beyond judgements about texts with clear ecological themes. Anecdotal method is ecocritical because it focuses on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis w...

The coincidence of the departure of the two Voyager spacecraft from the solar system with the Global Financial Crisis brought their mission and associated media back into prominence. The animations made by James Blinn, Charles Kohlhase, and colleagues at the time of their launches and the golden discs designed by Carl Sagan to carry sounds and imag...

Gore Verbinski’s computer-animated feature film Rango (2011) uses CGI (computer-generated imagery) to tell the story of a chameleon in the Wild West who learns to become a hero: a common narrative arc. The film also deals with drought. The relation between performance and self-presentation of its animated characters, Rango who pretends to be a hero...

Building on the melancholia of the films analysed thus far, a comparison between Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, based in a world in mourning for its future, and the space opera Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005), which concludes the story arc of Whedon’s TV series Firefly , gives an opportunity to further the discussion of history through an anal...

Iron Man 2 (John Favreau, 2010) focuses on a man isolated from his environment by a protective suit, and from his friends, family, and romantic interest by the conviction that he is dying as a result of the suit itself. While Tony Stark performs the role of billionaire playboy, Iron Man perceives the world in a doubled form, as perspectival image a...

‘Is it possible to differentiate between dominant and oppositional networks, for example? Or are they all so inextricably tied that even an analytical separation of them becomes useless?’ asks Arturo Escobar (2008: 11). Could a reconstituted form of image database exist? Could the mass image engender an oppositional agency that does not simply repl...

Déjà Vu, the 2006 film starring Denzel Washington directed by Tony Scott, is characterised by a number of glitches, marking aspects of the time-travel media and narrative as well as the condition described in the title. The chapter opens with a consideration of the economic doctrine of perfect communication and argues that no system can be both com...

Ecocritique is a practice of radical questioning, as essential to the critical armoury as feminism and postcolonialism have become. Anecdotes are ecocritical because they focus on encounters, concentrated moments of crisis when social ordering and ecological forces clash. Bringing ecological criticism to bear on case studies of popular culture in t...

Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) is the story of a clone haunted by memories of a previous existence. In the opening sequence, this ambivalent existence is echoed in the mix of digital and physical effects. Discussion of this ambivalence leads into an analysis of nonidentity versus identity, especially in a critical sequence in which clone Jack wat...

There exists a powerful fantasy that the world is not only describable in numbers but is composed of code, in which case the world-as-code can be rewritten. This theme has already emerged in the analyses of Oblivion and Déjà Vu , and is shared by a group of what are here named as ‘irreality’ films made during the global financial crisis. Source Cod...

The final challenge in proving the relevance of anecdotal method for contemporary purposes lies in the need to confront the now-dominant mode of accessing moving and still image media. Vast databases of social and streaming media now contain, store, process, and deliver video, audio, and visual content. It is always possible to encounter one or two...

Like other films analysed here, No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007) abandons humanism, but rather than offer recoding as a solution for historical impasses, it acts out two modes of history: as obligation, and as predestination. The border setting of the film’s action is more than metaphorical of these forms of history. It evokes bot...

Section 1 starts by considering the central notion of this book: a “ecocritique”. The ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well-being of the world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. It is all encompassing. Section 1 then considers how the term “anecdote” relates to ecocritique. Anecdotes pro...

https://mediaenviron.org/ Launch issue of the new Open Access journal Media + Environment, edited by Alenda Chang, Adrian Ivakhiv and Janet Walker with contributions by Jennifer Gabrys, Nicole Starosielski, Toby Miller, Sheldon Lu and, among others, my short piece on Ecocritique

Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically and aesthetically. But it also recognises that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are endl...

The term ‘transnational’ can be read in two simultaneous dimensions: as an ontological description of a primordially queer birthing (trans+natio) and as a trajectory of practice engaging with the historical actuality of borders. Ecocritique is centrally transnational in both senses, and ecomedia are privileged vehicles for conflictual practices of...

Zhang Qian’s second-century B.C.E. reports on his travels through what is now the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang begin two millennia of mediations of this large and fraught region. This article’s consideration of mediations on landscape begins with Tsui Hark’s film Seven Swords, looking back to drawing and photography, and forward to geo...

The chapter provides a conversation between the three authors in which a number of Burgin's site-specific installations frame a consideration of the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works. In the process Burgin modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?'. The C...

In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes' 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, but with reference to broader historical discourse that picks up on critical notions of 'zero', 'zero deg...

Unpublished Dreaft of paper submitted to launch issue of Media+Environment (https://mediaenviron.org/)

25 years ago Val Plumwood argued that our increasing economic, political and environmental degradation of the planet is the root of all human inequality and injustice. Struggles to balance the demands of feeding the world and maintaining its health while preserving its oceans and its cultural heritage make it clear that environmental ethics and str...

Films, and perhaps especially animated films, are ways of thinking. In their own ways, and beyond any intention of human filmmakers, films think. Animations think especially hard about movement, time and, unsurprisingly, animation: what motivates something to move. In their remarkably different ways, Muto (2007–2008) and Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) u...

The ancestral spirits are harsh: were they not men? (Pound 1954: 120). I take as my motto this phrase from the Confucian Odes, the book of folk songs collected by the great sage as a guide to rulers. Kung Fu-tse admonished the worthy man to pay attention to the songs of the poor as a window into their worlds, which the wise do well to take to heart...

This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern Modernity and its after-shocks. For sure this is because the dialectic of liquidity and crystallization, of flow and...

The first task is to describe if not define ethics: in the film context a quality of the unique instance (where politics might instead be about the consequences for all or for a majority or a group). Documentary for example has a duty to the unique events and subjects it pictures. The question then might be phrased: what is unique in animation? Thi...

pre-press text

The question of uncertainty raised in this special issue raises issues for the image as truthful, the truth that viewers can claim to find in images and the ethical dimensions of truth. By tracing some key changes in the history of photography, this paper demonstrates that the mass production and especially mass storage and distribution of images c...

Glitch describes the visual and auditory effects of interruptions of electronic signals. Glitches may be caused by naturally occurring electromagnetic noise, by electromagnetic effects of the technology, or by errors in coding, storage or transmission. Glitches have been treated as noise by engineers, but used by artists to foreground the materiali...

Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, tha...

NB: This paper is from a great special issue of the open access journal Ctrl-Z edited by Robert Briggs, all papers including this one dowloadable from http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/journal/ issue 7 Working on the same principles as the phonograph, but reading tremblings of the ground rather than of the air, scratching out in real time invisible actions...

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia en...

This chapter examines the large screens of Piccadilly Circus, London, to extrapolate how digital capitalism produces a depoliticised neoliberal public. From the narrow technological parameters to optimise visibility, to the relentless commercial occupation of these ‘public’ screens, Cubitt demonstrates how the possibility of a political public sphe...

Large public screens have now become a ubiquitous part of the contemporary cityscape. Far from being simply oversized televisions, the media experts contributing to Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces put forward a strong case that such screens could serve as important sites for cultural exchange. Advances in digital technology spell th...

I take the Aristotelean view that the question for ethics is ‘How should I live?’ and the question for politics is ‘How are we supposed to live?’ Aristotle’s next step was to argue that in both instances, these are questions about the good life. These are fundamentally aesthetic questions. So let me advance as a hypothesis that the reason for doing...

In this chapter, the question concerning the identity of the aesthetic as rooted in the present moment of aesthetic experience, must be formulated in a way that allows for the co-presence of not only artwork and audience but also the social that forms both of them. The chapter incorporates history in the aesthetic encounter. The authors are also gi...

Irrevocably historical, landscape is already denatured before it is represented, a repository of history which becomes, in representation, a record of history’s erasure under the banner of natural beauty. Questioning key aesthetic concepts of human freedom and the autonomy of art in dialogue with Theodor Adorno and James Benning, this essay argues...

This is a mobility program, enabling students to study across Europe. During the two-year programme, each student will spend three semesters at at least three universities, and choose among the four in the final semester. After completing the programme, students will receive a joint master degree from the universities they have attended. Up to 13 o...

Contemporary digital formalism emerges in the concept of ‘beautiful data’ (Halpern 2015), the visualization of information in intrinsically pleasing patterns which may or may not also provide useful ways of using the data. Data visualization is now both big business and a ubiquitous feature of digital arts and the aesthetic of the ‘postdigital’. It...

This article considers the ending of the short Canadian animation, Ryan (2004) by Chris Landreth. It addresses the role of continuity editing in vector graphics to argue that the film exhibits, despite its fantastic surface, a paradoxical form of realism.

This essay deals with technologies, techniques, business models and legal structures governing telecommunications infrastructures. Megacities are especially vulnerable to shifting agencies in telecoms provision. This paper addresses the relation of the economics of growth, built-in obsolescence and product life cycles with the complex determination...

Ecocritical work on media has developed from a genre criticism of nature-themed films to address cinema, TV, and media arts more broadly as articulations of the human-natural relation and its mediation through technologies. Embracing the environmental impacts of product life cycles, from materials extraction and industrial production to energy use...

It is not only the physical digital media that pile waste upon waste in an era of built-in obsolescence driven by over-production attempting to balance the falling rate of profit. Energy used in the manufacture, employment and recycling of devices belongs to a system where waste is not merely accidental but integral to the operation of cognitive ca...

Studies of environmentalism in media and cultural studies have largely focused on the communication of political strategies and scientific truths, on representation, and on genre and thematic criticism. This article looks at current work on the environmental impacts of digital media and argues that this gives a new perspective on political economy...

This is the pre-press Preface to the book Practice of Light

Using a number of his recent site-specific installations, conceptual artist and theorist Victor Burgin discusses the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works that combine both still and moving images. In the process he modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?'...

This paper argues that cultural analyses of electric light, including aspects of actor-network theory, may raise the spectre of complexity, but do not do it justice when they omit to provide analysis of the intertwined roles of culture and political economy in the formation of the provision and use of electric light. The essay looks at the marketiz...

In both electronic scanning and film projection the image must disappear for fragments of every second. Where perspective rests on a vanishing point, projection relies on a vanishing instant, the sudden plunge into imperceptible darkness. This article traces the art history of the vanishing of the image in the history of shadow. For Plato, who want...

Analysis of the material properties of the Internet reveals its true weight: the mass of component routers, switches, cables, satellites, cellnet masts, and of course computers, and the vast network of resource extraction, manufacturing, energy generation, and waste in which its functioning is embedded. Equally important is understanding the massle...

La réalité est autre chose. – (Au hasard Balthazar)

The transition from analogue to digital photography was not accomplished in a single step. It required a number of feeder technologies which enabled and structured the nature of digital photography. Among those traced in this article, the most important is the genesis of the raster grid, which is now hard-wired into the design of the most widely em...