Extractive Media

EXTRACTIVE MEDIA: AESTHETICS & INFRASTRUCTURES OF DEPLETION

Project Co-Directors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Debashree Mukherjee, and Brian Larkin

Project Coordinator: Hannah Pivo

Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here? The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen. We begin with the question of how media forms (print, architecture, photography, cinema, or, more recently, computational media) have historically contributed to material and imaginative modes of extraction, and, further, how we might turn to these very forms to find new possibilities for equitable futures?

This project is supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and SOF/Heyman
 

EVENTS

UPCOMING

Frame from the video Another type of movement, from Parel rushes. Shows a yellow car from above.  September 19, 2024 Vertical Integration: An artist talk with CAMP (Mumbai)

A "Hindu laborer" gathers sap from a rubber tree on a plantation in Fiji. Stereograph card published by Keystone View Company, NY, c. 1880.  November 11, 2024 Extractive Media Seminar

Plate 1, “The Colonial House,” from Carl Bernhard Wadström, An Essay on Colonization (1794)  December 13 & 14, 2024 Extractive Media Workshop

PAST

April 27, 2024 Camera South Asia II 

April 24, 2024 Stephanie O'Rourke: John Martin: How to Scale a Volcano

March 4, 2024 Eleanor Johnson & Jonah Rowen

January 25, 2024 Brian R. Jacobson: Extractive Time

November 15, 2023 Macarena Gómez-Barris: Elemental Thinking and the Representation of Extraction

October 26, 2023 Jo Guldi: The Dangerous Art of Text Mining

October 11, 2023 Reinhold Martin: The Remediation of Oil: Use-Value or Utility?

April 27, 2023 Camera South Asia: A Symposium on Cinema and Photography

 

PUBLICATIONS

See below a list of recent publications by working group members:

Debashree Mukherjee (2022). Energy and Exhaustion in a Coal Melodrama: Kaala Patthar (1979), in Ecocinema: Theory & Practice II, Eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt. Routledge, pp. 52-69.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Nineteenth-Century Alchemy: Mineral Statistics circa 1850,” Perspecta 55 (Spring 2023), pp. 30-43.