Project: Media as infrastructure? Investigating Nordic Ecomedia

The impending environmental crisis entails a range of alarming prospects, including mass extinctions, catastrophic pollution, planetary resource depletion and global heating. Ecomedia communicates the environmental crisis both within the scientific community and to the public. They play a vital role in how humans understand, feel, and imagine the ecologically compromised present and possible futures. In this project we investigate the function of ecomedia and mediation within these communicative processes and knowledge productions, but also their implication in this environmental crisis.

Project information

Project manager
Erik Erlanson
Other project members
Niklas Salmose, Ola Ståhl, Matilda Davidsson
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Aarhus universitet
Financier
NOS-HS
Timetable
2022–2023
Subject
Intermedial studies, Film studies, Literary studies, Visual studies, Design, Artistic research

More about the project

Media as Infrastructure? Investigating Nordic Ecomedia (MIINE) is a cross-disciplinary workshop series. Gathering researchers from LNUC Intermedial and multimodal studies, NTNU in Trondheim, and Aarhus University, we aim to open novel perspectives on the roles and functions of media in relation to contemporary ecological crises and catastrophes.

To make sense of these crises and catastrophes but also to face the challenges they entail, we argue that a focus on media, i.e. on that which stands between a living organism and its organism, is vital. Media needs to be analysed both with respect to the limits they impose on the relation between human and environment and with respect to how they are used to communicate and mediate the environmental crises.

By media we refer to any item serving to mediate between two human or non-human entities. It may be a scientific report, but also an artistic practice a literary text or a tree. Media are the means to communicate with each other and with our surroundings – thereby they also constitute an integral part of the set of historical and discursive conditions determining our relationship with our surroundings. In MIINE, it is these two aspects of the role and significance of media that we intend to examine.

Two media theoretical perspectives usually kept apart thus meet in this project: a media ecological approach and an intermedial approach. These two perspectives have been developed within separate traditions. By combining them, we suggest that it is possible to advance both fields of research and to further develop the theoretical models currently in use by ecocritical, intermedial and media-ecological scholars.

The project is part of the research in:

Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency (MEDEM)
Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)