Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies

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Title Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies

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Journal PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, 131(2)

ISSN 0030-8129

Author Carruth, Allison

Publication Date 2016-03-01

DOI 10.1632/pmla.2016.131.2.364

Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California [ PMLA the changing profession

Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies IN 2009 WILLIAM PANNAPACKER PRONOUNCED THE DIGITAL HUMAN- ITIES TO BE “THE FIRST ‘NEXT BIG THING’ IN A LONG TIME” PROMISING

to reconfigure and reinvigorate the humanities. The same could allison carruth now plausibly be said about the environmental humanities with the recent rise of dedicated academic centers (at, e.g., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden; Princeton University; the Uni- versity of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah), grant- funded projects (like the Sawyer Seminar on the Environ- mental Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the consortium Humanities for the Environment ), and faculty positions. If the digital and environmental humanities have been ascendant amid what Christopher Newield describes as the “unmaking” of public higher education and what Richard Grusin terms the “crisis humanities,” such an assessment invites the question of whether the ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) might serve to combine the most saleable facets of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities for university stakeholders who promote applied humanities work outside academia or, alternatively, a hybrid method for researching, teaching, and designing cultural responses to structures of ecological and social precarity (Grusin 80). While these potential futures of EcoDH could unfold simultaneously, I aim in what follows to pave the way for this hybrid method, by ofering a supplemental framework for connecting the environmental and digital humanities, which this essay terms ecological media studies. A prompt for academic inquiry as well as collaboration ALLISON CARRUTH, associate professor outside academia, this framework combines scholarly attentiveness in the Department of English and the to the material ecologies of new media and digital computing with Institute for Society and Genetics at the the participatory, playful media practices at work in twenty-irst- University of California, Los Angeles, is century environmental art and activism. he new materialist provo- afﬁliated with the university’s Institute cation to understand all bodies—human, animal, plant, mineral, of the Environment and Sustainability. She is the author of Global Appetites: microbial, machine, and inanimate—in their material and semantic American Power and the Literature of lives and in their networked and individuated phases informs my Food (Cambridge UP, 2013). conceptualization of ecological media studies by suggesting that the

© 2016 allison carruth 364 PMLA 131.2 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America 131.2 ] Allison Carruth 365 ubiquity of ecological metaphors for the digi- from what Buell terms irst- wave ecocriticism the changing profession tal (from data mining to media ecology itself) (“Ecocriticism”). Namely, environmental hu- obscures the matter of digital technologies. manities projects are expanding the param- eters of environmental culture by addressing not only literary texts but also visual art, The Ecological Digital Humanities: performance, new media, activist ephemera, Genealogies and Horizons popular science, ethnographies, and scientiic In a 2004 primer, Greg Garrard deines eco- models; by imagining nature to include cities, criticism capaciously as the literary and cul- food systems, diasporas, indigenous cosmolo- tural study of ecological problems wherein gies, and global energy networks along with rhetorical analysis is central. Garrard ob- wilderness sites and rural locales; and by de- serves that the organizing premise of such an veloping critical theories of the environment. endeavor is the notion that “environmental Two publications illustrate these intel- problems require analysis in cultural as well lectual trends and open onto the question of as scientiic terms, because they are the out- what imperatives and ideas are shaping (or come of an interaction between ecological might shape) EcoDH. he irst is a 2009 Criti- knowledge of nature and its cultural inlec- cal Inquiry essay that has become required tion,” or, more aptly, inlections (14). In step reading in the environmental humanities: the with Lawrence Buell and Ursula K. Heise,1 postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Garrard traces the history of ecocriticism “he Climate of History.” Organized around from an initial focus on nature writing, wil- four theses, the essay posits that the science of derness rhetoric, and local place- based identi- anthropogenic climate change—which shows ties to widening concerns with environmental that with industrialization humans become justice, urban ecologies, other-than- human geological agents and which accordingly sug- bodies, and the environmental consequences gests an epochal shit from the Holocene to of colonialism and globalization. Ecocriticism what has been provisionally termed the An- by this measure has become a “convenient thropocene—requires a new historiographic shorthand,” as Heise puts it, for variegated ap- practice. Such a practice, Chakrabarty con- proaches that fall under the headings of “en- tends, should start by jettisoning “the age- old vironmental criticism, literary- environmental humanist distinction between natural his- studies, literary ecology, literary environ- tory and human history” (201). While critics mentalism, and green cultural studies”—a of Anthropocene discourse have cautioned catalog to which we could add theoretically against its tendency toward a universalism and politically inlected ields such as post- that elides the unequally shared causes and colonial ecologies, environmental justice consequences of climate change, Chakrabarty cultural studies, and material ecocriticism mostly avoids this pitfall in arguing that en- (“Hitchhiker’s Guide” 506).2 As ecocriticism vironmental history—and by extension the has become more multiform over the last de- environmental humanities—best responds to cade, so too have ecocritics resituated their climate change by bringing “together intellec- work within the environmental humanities, tual formations that are somewhat in tension deined to include literature, media studies, with each other: the planetary and the global; science studies, philosophy, history, art his- deep and recorded histories; species thinking tory, cultural geography, and anthropology and critiques of capital” (213). his idea has (not to mention the digital humanities). How- particular implications for EcoDH. If we fol- ever multidisciplinary, the environmental hu- low Chakrabarty’s argument, a ield sited at manities arguably cohere in how they depart the convergence of ecological problems and 366 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ PMLA

digital humanities methods should strive to that employs spatial mapping as well as text- interlace the timescales of “deep and recorded mining methods. Scholars like Chakrabarty histories” with the compressed temporality and Alaimo suggest the importance of histo- of the digital (as in the real- time cadence of ricizing and materializing the digital technol- rapid prototyping, database querying, and ogies that constitute the research apparatus of media streaming) and to recognize not only such EcoDH projects by mapping those tech- the bodies of species and institutions of capi- nologies onto timescales slower than the real- tal but also the virtual networks that connect, time “interval” of “versions, updates, and . . . track, and animate both. half-lives” and by apprehending them within The second publication with insights material networks composed of biological the changing profession changing the for EcoDH is Bodily Natures, by the femi- and engineered bodies (Raley 39). nist science studies scholar Stacy Alaimo, who has been at the forefront of the material The Digital Humanities: turn. Like the collections Material Feminism From Computational Techniques to (which she coedited) and Material Ecocriti- Material Conditions cism (to which she contributed an essay), Bodily Natures takes nature seriously in its I will return to Chakrabarty’s and Alaimo’s concrete multiplicities—presenting Alaimo’s principles below in pivoting from EcoDH to research on the science and culture of X- rays, ecological media studies. As a bridge, I turn toxic chemicals, deep -sea creatures, and plas- now to recent calls for the digital humanities tic compounds. In doing so, it contests ten- writ large to examine and intervene in the ma- dencies in poststructuralism, posthumanism, terial social conditions of network society and and certain strands of ecocriticism to abstract digital infrastructure. In dialogue with other nature from its material and historical in- scholars, N. Katherine Hayles locates the ori- stantiations. To guide her research, Alaimo gins of the digital humanities in decades- old develops a theory of transcorporeality, a the- humanities computing eforts to digitally pre- ory rooted in the idea that “the material self serve and parse text archives. These efforts cannot be disentangled from networks that laid the groundwork for the digital humani- are simultaneously economic, political, cul- ties to organize initially around “machine tural, scientiic, and substantial” and in the reading” techniques of encoding, mining, and corollary notion that the “material environ- analyzing lexical and generic patterns in large ment is a realm of oten incalculable, inter- corpora of texts. Taking stock of the present, connected agencies” (20–21; emphasis mine). Hayles contends that the digital humani- Putting Chakrabarty’s scale-shifting ties are “morphing” as researchers “advocate historiography into dialogue with Alaimo’s a turn from a primary focus on text encod- materialist feminism offers another pos- ing, analysis, and searching to multimedia sible direction to early adopters of EcoDH practices that explore the fusion of text- based (whether or not they would identify with the humanities with film, sound, animation, label)—from the Humanities for the Environ- graphics, and other multimodal practices” ment–sponsored Life Overlooked, an archive (25). Gary Hall reinforces this claim, noting that contains multimedia narratives of lora, that the digital humanities now encompass fauna, and other bodies inhabiting the crev- “interactive information visualization, science ices of local places, to the interactive Nature- visualization, image processing, geospatial hoods, a database of parks and other green representation, statistical data analysis, net- spaces in three dozen cities in the United work analysis, and the mining, aggregation, States that Stanford University hosts and management, and manipulation of data” (781). 131.2 ] Allison Carruth 367

Such appraisals dovetail with Alan Liu’s project is vital, given that “the institutional the changing profession 2013 blog post on the thorny question of structure of digital humanities threatens to whether the term digital humanities should intensify . . . the proliferation of temporary be singular or plural. While Liu acknowl- insecure labor that is rampant not only in the edges that when treated as singular the term academy but throughout twenty-irst- century names a coherent ield, he suggests that the capitalism” (82). In enumerating the forms digital humanities would do well to retain a that “critical relection” might take for the plural sense of self by “engag[ing] in much digital humanities, Raley looks to the “self- fuller conversation with their affiliated or reflexivity about situatedness” in cultural enveloping disciplinary fields (e.g., literary studies and the “playful interventions” of studies, history, writing programs, library new media art practices that she has classed studies, etc.), cousin ields (e.g., new media under the heading of tactical media (35, 40). studies), and the wider public about where Referring to exempla like the independent they it in, which is to say, how they contrib- network WiFi .Bedouin, Raley writes, “Tac- ute to a larger, shared agenda expressed in tics are designed to produce open-ended the conjunction and collision of many ields” questions rather than definitive answers, (“Is”). Liu echoes recent critiques of the digi- to lead to new discovery rather than diag- tal humanities (including his own) that query nostic evaluation, such that the researcher the growing professional divide between the remains continually aware of the mechan- production of computational algorithms, ics of knowledge production and attuned to databases, and tools and the cultural study the possibilities of alternative techniques, of digital media (Grusin; Hall; Hayles; Liu, frames, and paradigms” (39). his mode of “Where”; Raley). hese analyses of such a di- tactical critique and countercultural engi- vide encourage a détente between praxis and neering, Raley suggests, could powerfully criticism and between the digital humanities retool the digital humanities. and the so- called interpretive humanities. Holding up Franco Moretti’s distant Ecological Media Studies: Projects reading methodology for its capacity to pose and Prototypes cultural and sociological questions of large text corpora, Liu envisions digital humani- he environmental humanities have a poten- ties approaches that integrate “text analysis tially unique contribution to make to such and cultural analysis” (“Where”). Namely, he tactical digital humanities by delving into advocates for cultural analysis of the “instru- what we could term, building on Raley’s for- mentality” paradigm that shapes knowledge mulation, the ecological materiality of digital work in the information age, including the “knowledge production” and by collaborat- knowledge work of the digital humanities. ing on “techniques, frames, and paradigms” Elaborating on this idea, Rita Raley argues that model alternative labor conditions and that the digital humanities have proved “par- alternative environmental ethics to those of ticularly useful” (or instrumental, as Liu puts late capitalism. I contend that ecological me- it) “in our current mercantile knowledge re- dia studies ofers a nimble rubric for doing gime, with its rational calculus of academic just that. My thesis builds on the arguments value” (32). She identiies a pressing need for that Hayles, Raley, Tara McPherson, Patrick “more critical reflection upon, and ironic Jagoda, Wendy H. K. Chun, and others have self- awareness about, the embedded place made for linking the digital humanities, me- of digital humanities in the contemporary dia studies, and multimodal media practices knowledge economy” (34). For Grusin, this and thereby generating more robust methods 368 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ PMLA

and theories by which the “materiality in me- fauna, rare earth minerals, earth and sea un- dia” may be understood (Hayles 7). dergrounds, regional watersheds, and glob- Hayles teases this trope out on grounds ally networked energy ields that constitute that are especially resonant with ecological both the environments and infrastructures of media studies. Her work provides concep- the digital. Situated at the crossroads of the tually rich histories of the embodied forms environmental humanities and media stud- that digital technologies assume in literary ies, a number of projects have recently begun narratives, visual media, scientiic research, to model this undertaking. Notable examples engineered machines, and human- computer include Sue Thomas’s exploration of “tech- interfaces. Her latest thinking along these nobiophilia”; the essay collection Ecomedia the changing profession changing the lines swerves toward new materialism and, and its companion blog (Rust, Monani, and if tacitly, the environmental humanities. In Cubitt); Heise’s account of “unnatural” eco- How We Think, she writes that to “gras[p] logical metaphors in media ecology (“Unnat- the complex ways in which the time scales ural Ecologies”); Richard Maxwell and Toby of human cognition interact with those of Miller’s environmental history of old and new intelligent machines requires a theoretical media and accompanying criteria for green framework in which objects are seen not as media practices; Stephanie LeMenager’s in- static entities that, once created, remain the clusion of print and digital media in the same throughout time but rather are under- “petroleum archive” she builds for her book stood as constantly changing assemblages” Living Oil; Nicole Starosielski’s accounts of (13). This argument chimes with Alaimo’s the media heat and undersea cables that help concept of transcorporeality while calling to power the Internet (“Materiality”); Heather to mind Jane Bennett’s description of assem- Houser’s contemplation of how data visual- blages in Vibrant Matter. his sense of com- ization and information management tools puting technologies as bodies embedded in operate across contemporary environmental material networks informs Hayles’s related media to disseminate “data sets that are too points about the geospatial materiality of large, complicated, inaccessible, or tedious digital production. “If time is deeply involved for [individuals] to comprehend” (319); an with the productions of digital media, so too online storytelling platform about foraging is space,” Hayles writes, explaining that “GIS ecosystems, cultures, and economies, known (geographic information system) mapping, as Matsutake Worlds Live; and, finally, the GPS (global positioning system) technolo- open-source app Curatescape, designed to gies, and their connections with networked enable communities to exhibit site-specific and programmable machines have created a histories (Tebeau and Cleveland State Univ.). culture of spatial exploration in digital me- As this range of examples indicates, the dia” (14). Hayles’s arguments show that we emerging field of EcoDH, which I am fur- think the digital not just through virtual ther delineating as ecological media studies, programs and distributed networks but also runs the gamut from peer-reviewed scholar- through the extended, embodied “cognition” ship that draws on archival research, herme- that human-computer interactions germinate neutics, and cultural history to experimental and, critically, through the “larger networks research that blends ieldwork, media aesthet- that extend beyond” devices and users “into ics, and creative noniction to self-published the environment” (3). sites that aggregate multimedia narratives EcoDH qua ecological media studies can with geolocated data. he projects share the lesh out these principles by addressing the investments identiied above as constitutive of nonhuman and nonmachine bodies of lora, ecological media studies. hat is, each endeav- 131.2 ] Allison Carruth 369 ors to provide material histories and theories ten billion network connections worldwide). the changing profession of digital technologies and—whether through Observing that “the cloud’s apparent ubiquity traditional scholarship, public projects, or makes it diicult to assume an outside, criti- both—to make visible the ecological as well as cal perspective on its infrastructure,” I have the sociocultural circumstances of networks. elsewhere identified a lack of attention in I hope that in the future ecological media environmental and media studies to the con- studies—now a somewhat aspirational ield— crete materials, and material consequences, of will continue to bring further coherence to the Internet’s growing footprint (343). Such these multipronged eforts. Here, Starosiel- inquiries underscore that it would be fruitful ski’s research on Internet infrastructure (de- for ecological media studies to cultivate “an ined to encompass the mined metals, cellular ecological ethic for storing, accessing, and towers, satellites, cables, servers, data centers, sharing data that takes into account forms of and networked devices that coproduce digi- digital power and disempowerment” (353). In tal networks) provides an exciting prototype. 1967 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore Starosielski was arguably the first media asserted that in the information age any “un- studies scholar to develop an eco-centric ap- derstanding of social and cultural change is proach to the materiality of digital media and impossible without a knowledge of the way networks. he approach informs her research media work as environments” (26). While on the undersea cables that disturb coastlines their assertion relegated biophysical environ- around the world (“Beaches,” “‘Warning,’” ments to the rhetorical status of metaphor and “Critical Nodes”). So too does it inlect (ironically, just as environmentalism was her short history of the evolving hot- and- cold coming to life as a social movement), ecologi- registers for diferent media (“Materiality”). cal media studies might return ecology to a hat account ends with a relection on data literal register by taking up the matter of digi- centers and suggests that material as well as tal technologies and the ecology of media. rhetorical links now exist between the Inter- net and global climate change: “Data centers Coda: Ecological Media Praxis and computer systems generate enormous amounts of heat, which in turn form one of he intellectual contexts for ecological media the greatest threats to communications sys- studies posited above suggest how blurry the tems. . . . An attention to the generation and boundaries are becoming between the digital redistribution of this heat connects media humanities and media studies. hese blurred to the energy infrastructures on which they boundaries stem partly from cultural work depend and, in turn, to the intensification outside academia—including do- it- yourself of global warming” (“Materiality” 2505). maker culture, citizen science, new media art, As Starosielski concludes, this attention tactical media, and hacktivism—that does to virtual-biophysical exchanges (like the not separate practice from theory, engineer- heat exchanges that attend the flow of data ing from critique. through networks) “help[s] us to better un- The existing projects we might tag as derstand how media both enfolds and gives EcoDH have often taken cues from and, rise to a set of broader environmental rela- in some cases, joined these communities tions and conditions for life” (2506). Her con- of practice beyond the university. The Hu- clusion here dovetails with my own analysis manities for the Environment stands out on of “the digital cloud” (or the Internet in the this score. An international Mellon- funded era of apps, social media, mobile computing, consortium of humanities centers, it has in- cloud storage platforms, and the estimated volved an array of collaborators, including 370 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ PMLA

historians, ecocritics, bioethicists, environ- approach” aiming to catalyze conversation, mental justice scholars and activists, forest community, and social change (xiii, 9, 1). Play ecologists, creative writers, artists, and urban the LA River can be described in kindred designers. One project in which public en- terms: a public call to communities across gagement and collaborative environmental Los Angeles, especially those living along the media praxis coalesced was Dinner 2040, ity- one- mile length of the Los Angeles River, organized by the Arizona State University to “enjoy, reclaim and reimagine the river as team in the Western Observatory of the Hu- a civic space that can green and connect” ur- manities for the Environment. Dinner 2040 ban communities (“Play”). he project sought adapted a design process used in architecture to support ongoing environmental and social the changing profession changing the and urban planning known as charrette to justice eforts and to widen the public sphere convene local and visiting academics as well around those eforts through tactics—in Ral- as artists, chefs, farmers, activists, and other ey’s sense—that made use of print media, dig- community members to address the question ital tools, and community gatherings. he last “what should be on our plates for Dinner in of these tactics, which proved challenging to 2040?” (“Dinner”). A creative and speculative implement, centered on a single year (Septem- exercise that digitally archived participants’ ber 2014 to September 2015) of collaborative narratives, values, concerns, and hopes in programming with other groups (in addition response to that question, Dinner 2040 was to social media prompts to spontaneous river modeled on an actual public dinner that took excursions). This part of Play the LA River place in the street along multiple blocks of featured small- scale picnics and riverside downtown Phoenix and that used media old zine-making workshops as well as exhibits and new (including vinyl illustrated place- of site- speciic student art and performance, mats) to galvanize conversation about the among other events. At the project’s center ecological prospects and possibilities for the was a playful and playable media artifact that region’s food system. dovetailed with these community eforts: an Keeping in mind the experimental and oversize deck of cards and an online interac- participatory structure of Dinner 2040, I tive companion that each worked as a provi- would highlight another prototype for ecolog- sional and open-ended guide to ity- two sites ical media studies in which generating public along the Los Angeles River. his mix of print engagement with a city’s ecological futures and digital media, live gatherings, and distrib- animates a participatory project that is at uted participation made Play the LA River an once artful and activist: Play the LA River. A experiment in employing tactical media and project cofounded by the urban planner John participatory art to foster and make publicly Arroyo, the designer and documentary pho- visible community involvement and invest- tographer Barron Bixler, the artist Amanda ment in urban ecologies. Evans, the historians Catherine Gudis and Projects like Play the LA River and Din- Jenny Price, and me (and in which LeMenager, ner 2040 demonstrate how the environmental a coeditor of this special cluster, was an early humanities—in turning toward the digi- collaborator), Play the LA River took shape tal—might turn outward to ecological media as a mix of environmental outreach and so- practices and publics. Such projects expand cially engaged participatory art. 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