In the context of critical global media studies, this article demonstrates how Western visual-aesthetic registers can invisibilize an existing place and its inhabitants through the uncritical celebration of its imagined futures. Taking Singapore as a case study, the article focuses on two sites of mediatization: the 2018 National Geographic documentary feature, City of the Future: Singapore, and 2019–20 media reports on the filming of HBO’s Westworld in Singapore. It argues that these media artifacts employ the trope of allochronic futurity: a denial of coevalness that seeks recourse in a future time-outside-time. This media trope is produced and sustained by two kinds of registers—a discursive register and a visual-aesthetic register—that inform promotional mediatized genres. While the promotional genres and discourses analyzed here construct Singapore’s distinctiveness, the visual-aesthetic register renders Singapore generic in its visualized futuristic-ness.
Drawing principally on public performances in lectures, interviews, and staged presentations, rather than on published texts, this paper discusses McLuhan’s still overlooked contribution to media studies, including a conceptualization of multimodality that defies the logics of literacy, and refutes and refuses its barriers and boundaries. Seen here as a road not taken, McLuhan’s understanding of media, in the form of a transitional theory of media convergence, was an opportunity lost to understand, and to intentionally cultivate, our experience of multimodality, not as a media multiplication, addition, or enhancement, but with the proto-acoustic ‘all-at-once-ness’ of multisensorial convergence. The cost of that lost opportunity for media studies, we argue, has been a conception of multimodality in particular, and media convergence in general, as a ‘multiplication’ driven principally by the characters, capabilities, and economies of digital technologies, not the still vastly untapped sensory and cognitive capabilities of human beings.
Plastic remains one of the most ubiquitous forms that oil takes as a mediating force in our everyday life. This article tracks the way in which this function of plastic has been obfuscated, particularly within the discursive space of academia, by way of a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. After contextualizing the author’s vision of a neoliberal media culture through a brief history of the recent disciplinary convergences of media studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, I argue that Yamashita’s novel functions as a proleptic, literary articulation of the kinds of insights made possible by the combination of the three. Through its particular attention to the lifecycle of media—the transformation of plastic from raw material into technical object and then into trash—I argue that the novel offers a theory of plastic as media that usefully emphasizes its relation to the natural world as much as it does its connection to technology and culture.Image Credit: From the cover of Karen Tei Yamashita\u0027s book, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press (2017), https://coffeehousepress.org/products/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest.
In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.
This article explores the publicity and advertising campaigns undertaken by the British Petroleum Company (BP) during the 1920s, focusing specifically on the Persian Khan exhibit mounted at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925. Despite their rich value as primary sources, the marketing campaigns of British oil companies—and in particular of BP—have been relatively overlooked by historians. Using an energy humanities approach, the article reconstructs the Khan exhibit and its galleries, revealing an imaginary world in which oil was framed as an exotic prize held captive beneath wild and inhospitable landscapes. As BP’s most elaborate and expensive advertising campaign of the 1920s, seen and visited by millions, the Persian Khan exhibit provides a valuable lens through which to view the broader development of British attitudes toward oil during the period.
Drawing on the social media content of four pro-oil Facebook groups, we argue that these ‘subsidized publics’ play an increasingly critical role in facilitating oil and gas companies’ continued accumulation of fossil capital. We adopt O’Shaughnessy and Krogman’s (2011) analytical framework to reveal material-discursive contradictions obscured from view in the pages of these online groups. Through deploying gendered and familial discourses, these subsidized publics celebrate traditional gender roles, present oil as a ubiquitous and benevolent force, and blur the divide between oil and gas workers on the one hand, and absentee transnational employers on the other. In an era of advanced neoliberal petro-capitalism, these quasi-public entities are masking the inherently unequal power relationship that exists between the two. Moreover, in projecting a working-class ethos, we argue that these familial and gendered discourses create a homogenizing narrative, advancing the false notion of a “classless and horizontally beneficial” industry (Gaventa, 1982, p. 58). Our analysis disrupts neoliberal representations of de-gendered extraction and highlights the extent to which gender remains a key axis within resource communities.
Films sponsored by the American oil industry during the Cold War often pit communism and capitalism against each other, arguing for the latter’s ideological superiority. Since abstract ideologies are difficult to represent visually, the battle takes concrete form via depictions of layers of underground rock in films like The Last Ten Feet (1949) and Destination Earth (1956), which demonstrate how the American oil industry’s engineering ingenuity locates and extracts the precious crude oil reserves found therein. In this essay, I argue that by harnessing moving images’ power to visualize the optically elusive, films sponsored by the oil industry show it to have technological access to customarily inaccessible underground space, thus making the industry seem a more potent foil for the Red menace. Image Credit: Screenshot from Destination Earth (1956).
In this artistic contribution, New York-based German artist Heide Hatry offers pictures of her sculpture series Imagine It Thick In Your Own Hair. According to Hatry, the project was intended to make people aware of the tragedy and motivate them to help clean up the disaster BP created in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs, and cremated remains. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, death, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.
In this brief interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses Thunderbird Strike with Anishinaabe, Métis, and settler-Irish media theorist and artist Elizabeth LaPensée. Thunderbird Strike is a multiplatform, two-dimensional sidescrolling video game created by LaPensée in collaboration with Adrian Cheater and Aubrey Jane Scott (programming), NÀHGĄ a.k.a. Casey Koyczan (music and sound effects), and Kaitlin Rose Lenhard (cut scene editing). The conversation is centred on the inspiration for Thunderbird Strike, its reception, and its possibilities as a pedagogical medium.
This essay argues that one of the factors holding back civilization-wide transitions to renewable energy is the widespread tendency to render petroleum and other hydrocarbons abject and abstract. Fossil fuel industry representations do this by hiding the true costs of petroculture behind the virtualization Energy; environmentalist framings do it by relying too much on petroaesthetics of doom (i.e., apocalyptic imagery) and gloom (i.e., Gothic visualizations of oil spills and rusting extractive infrastructure). The scarcity of representations of hydrocarbons that acknowledge both their life-giving and life-destroying properties, their powerful nonhuman agency in mediating practically every human and nonhuman relationship in the modern world, makes it hard to imagine alternatives to petroculture. Recently, artists have begun subverting petroaesthetic conventions in ways that counter the abstraction and abjection of hydrocarbons, including by using crude oil as an artistic medium in its own right. The oddly playful bitumen sands photographs of Louis Helbig, the bitumen-based “petrographs” of Warren Cariou, and the weird, enthralling “oilscapes” of Kathleen Thum are interpreted as meaningful challenges to the petroaesthetic status quo—provocations that matter in every sense of the word. Beyond merely promoting energy transitions, these images perform transitions as they empower viewers to see hydrocarbons as media with which all living things are deeply entangled.
Aaron Tucker's Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema succeeds in uniting recent popular film with critical media and technology studies, demonstrating through familiar cinematic examples that audiences' relationship with technology is increasingly normalized.Dealing with theoretical questions relating to posthumanism and identity, as well as the establishment of digital technologies in everyday and political spheres, Tucker understands today's cinematic spectator as a digitally informed media user.His main focus is on the "machinic audience," the emergence of which he traces alongside the historical development of the Internet.Through this approach, he negotiates the various ways in which popular Hollywood films since the 1980s do two things: portray computational technologies and networks and represent changing cultural attitudes towards these technologies and the Internet.
This article explores how fossil fuels are expressed on the surface of specific media: billboards. It is based on observations made during a “scholarly” road trip to West Texas aimed at studying the protests surrounding the construction of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Blending travel writing with a theoretical analysis of billboards, the article investigates the philosophy behind the Shale Revolution and examines the specific petroculture of the Permian Basin. Given their necessary conciseness, clarity and effectiveness, billboards contain both straightforward messages and profound subliminal cultural references. This makes them meaningful means to understand how oil and gas are embedded in the culture of Oil Country. It is argued that billboards related to fossil fuel extraction constitute nuanced forms of “petromedia” whose semantics and design reinforce a specific “philosophy of energy.” The petrocultural philosophy of West Texas is strongly anthropocentric and promotes ideas such as the instrumentality of nature, domination over untamed land, technoscientific power, drilling prowess, rugged individualism, and masculinity.
In this introduction to the special issue of MediaTropes on “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik provide an account of the stakes and consequences of approaching oil as media as they situate it within the “material turn” of media studies and the broader project energy humanities. They argue that by critically approaching oil and its infrastructures as media, the contributions that comprise this issue puts forward one way to develop an account of oil that further refines the larger tasks and stakes implicit in the energy humanities. Together, these address the myriad ways in which oil mediates social, cultural, and ecological relations, on the one hand, and the ways in which it is mediated, on the other, while thinking through how such mediations might offer glimpses of a future beyond oil.
Technology of the twenty-first century has transformed our ability to create, modify, store, and share digital media and, in so doing, has presented new possibilities for how social science research can be conducted and mobilized. This paper introduces the use of collaborative podcasting as a research method of critical inquiry and knowledge mobilization. Using a case study, we describe the methodological process that our transdisciplinary team engaged in to create the Water Dialogues podcast, a collaborative initiative stemming from a larger research project examining approaches to implementing Indigenous and Western knowledge in water research and management. We situate collaborative podcasting within an expanding field of collaborative and participatory media practice in social research, and consider how the method may align with and support research within a decolonizing agenda.
Canadian mining activities have exploded throughout Latin America over the past 15-20 years, bringing a host of problems and leading to burgeoning resistance movements. This paper argues that a growing strategy deployed by Canadian mining companies, and the regimes that support them, in their engagements with Indigenous communities in the Global South who are resisting extractive activities on their territories, entails cultivating Indigenous subjectivities in ways that co-opt their aspirations for decolonization, self-determination, and demands for the recognition of Indigenous rights. That energy is then channelled into supporting, indeed demanding, the very model of extractive capitalism that Canadian mining regimes wish to develop in the region. Drawing upon theories of governmentality and the work of Canadian Indigenous scholars Glen Coulthard and Taiaiake Alfred on the politics of recognition and decolonization, this paper chronicles struggles over Indigeneity as a political subjectivity through three ongoing extractive-related conflicts in Guatemala, Chile, and Panama.
