Storytelling and Environmental Memory in the Digital Age Alicia Daniele

Mind the Spatiotemporal Gap: Storytelling and Environmental Memory in the Digital Age Alicia Daniele

Whether referred to as “global warming” or “climate change,” the mention of the current shift in worldwide weather phenomena associated with the rise in average global temperatures brings a few standard images to mind: a lone polar bear on a piece of ice adrift at sea; Al Gore speaking in front of a graph showcasing skyrocketing carbon dioxide numbers; and tidal waves felling landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or the London Bridge. The first is often too spatially distant from one’s day-today life to engender the empathy that leads to action; the second too didactic and, frankly, boring; and the third too temporally distant as well as apocalyptic and farfetched for the current time.

The majority of damage caused to the environment, and, therefore, to humankind and its constructions, is not immediately tangible; it is a creeping, invisible violence that accumulates over time and across space. This type of violence is often not given its due in the mass media because it lacks a notable event or spectacle. This creeping violence also lacks clear-cut signification in the rock strata, as exemplified in the debate between stratigraphers whether to establish the end of the

Holocene and declare our current geologic time the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene is declared, then stratigraphers will have to decide where to establish the geological time boundary, known as the

“golden spike.” Some geologists argue the spike should be placed several millennia ago when the agricultural cultivation and domestication of crops began; others for the industrial revolution and its iconic invention, the steam engine; and others for the mid-twentieth century when the nuclear age dawned.1

1 The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, led by stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz, decided recently that the Anthropocene began in the mid-twentieth century, but as of now they have not been able to choose a golden spike. They are assembling candidates for review: microplastics,

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In 2019, Dr. Jane Goodall, a working primatologist and anthropologist who began her career sixty years ago, briefly shared her firsthand experiences of the violence—the quick, temperate, and slow kinds—enacted against the environment with Time magazine. She recounts witnessing wildfires engulf Africa and California, beholding the remains of animals who died in droughts, and watching a

Mount Kilimanjaro glacier shrink.2 Although experiences like Dr. Goodall’s are useful, they will only amount to information, a form of knowledge whose value is contingent upon its newness, if they are not transformed further into narratives that can provide counsel for years to come. Since creeping environmental violence is often invisible to the collective, a different process needs to be enacted to bring it to the forefront of society’s consciousness: memory. Specifically, an environmental memory supported and proliferated by digital storytelling.3

In order to understand how digital storytelling can create and sustain a collective environmental memory, it is important to analyze how memory can be a carrier of environmental understanding and a stimulus to environmental intervention. Although this is not an easy question to answer, it merits unpacking. Each generation inhabits a world that is more deteriorated but is also that generation’s status quo. Just as our ancestors before us did and the generations to follow us will, we live in environmental circumstances generated by the actions of the deceased, which muddles the question of who is responsible for exposing, curtailing, and stopping the damage society enacts against the world which it inhabits. It is imperative for humans to find a way to bring the well-being

heavy metals, fly ash, and, Zalasiewicz’s current forerunner, radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons. (Nicola Davis, “The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?,” The Guardian, May 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-a- new-phase-of-planetary-history.) 2 Jane Goodall, “These 4 Issues May Not Seem Related to Climate Change. But They Are and We Need to Solve Them Now,” Time, September 12, 2019, https://time.com/5669043/jane-goodall-climate-change/. 3 At its core, digital storytelling is the practice of using multimedia to tell stories. It relies on digital technologies (those that allow the user to be both consumer and producer, which excludes the technology associated with the culture industries, like photography and cinematography) to empower the consumer to take control of their agency and participate in the world through its transformation.

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34 of the environment—and, therefore, themselves—to the forefront of social consciousness. The way forward is through storytelling, specifically the crafting and sharing of the stories of those who are often voiceless and whom climate change will affect the most, and, in fact, is already affecting: the vulnerable and underserved populations of the world.

The stories we tell have to be able to rise above the hum of everyday reticular life, which becomes more difficult in a mediascape that is inundated daily with various images and discourses of the world. By analyzing two examples of environmental memory–forming media objects, the documentary Plastic China (2016), and the multimodal virtual reality documentary, Collisions (2016), I will demonstrate how strong storytelling techniques coupled with digital technology can lift the various voices that have settled among the sediment to the surface, constitute the transindividuation of experience, and act as a catalyst for true social transformation.

In 2018, the United States experienced a recycling crisis when one of its biggest buyers,

China, suddenly stopped buying American recyclables. Although “Chinese manufacturers and

American companies alike became dependent on the exchange … the rise of single-stream recycling in U.S. communities ushered in higher contamination, resulting in lower-quality materials” and

China’s decision to stop buying foreign, low-quality goods and strengthen its own domestic recycling infrastructure.4 But what caused China to change its policy and decide to stop accepting its sixth- largest import?5 Known as Operation National Sword,6 some experts, according to 99% Invisible, suggest that one documentary film, Plastic China, sparked the change.

4 Beth Porter, “US Recycling Industry, Worth $100 Billion, Needs Creative Solutions Amid Ongoing Downturn,” International Business Times, November 30, 2018, https://www.ibtimes.com/us-recycling- industry-worth-100-billion-needs-creative-solutions-amid-ongoing-2737606. 5 “Understanding National Sword in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center, February 26, 2018, https://d12v9rtnomnebu.cloudfront.net/diveimages/Understanding_National_Sword_in_PA.pdf. 6 Operation National Sword, enacted January 1, 2018, is the policy in China that bans the importation of certain types of solid waste (CenterForTechnology.org).

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A film by director Jiu-Liang Wang, Plastic China tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl named Yi-Jie who does not go to school in order to help her parents at the plastic recycling facility where they work. The film’s official website describes Yi-Jie as

a truly global child who learns the outside world from the waste workshops that her family lives in and works in—also known as the “United Nations of Plastic Wastes.” She lives her happiness and sorrows amongst the waste, as well. Small packs of discarded instant black powder tell her the bitter taste of “coffee”; the English children’s learning cards teach her words like “summer” and “father’s day”; and broken Barbie dolls are her best friends to talk to. This is her world.7

Featured at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017, Plastic China went viral and then shortly thereafter disappeared from the Chinese internet.8 A portrait of the “true face of China,” the face of its poverty instead of its global prosperity, and the disease, pollution, and death that make up the lives of its poorest citizens, Plastic China is also a portrait of the American consumer. The documentary demonstrates what happens to America’s recycling after its citizens toss it into a recycling bin and stop thinking about it. Before Wang’s work, it would have been difficult for an

American consumer to fathom—let alone imagine—a Chinese girl living and playing amongst their refuse halfway across the world. It is a portrayal of the impacts our consumer culture has on others spatially distant from ourselves. Ji-Yie and her family’s story is one of secondary pollution. One does not need to read statistics and data representing this reality in order to believe it, one simply needs to bear witness to their story. As 99% Invisible describes it, the documentary

shows the families cutting up plastic, melting, soaking it and turning it into a sludge—then turning it into hardened pellets. The little girl washes her face in the gray plastic-polluted water and eats fish that have choked on bits of plastic. They live and work (and eat and sleep) near a plastic shredding machine, inhaling dust and microparticles that are byproducts of the process. The whole village is enveloped in plastic detritus.9

7 “Storyline,” Plastic China, accessed May 12, 2019, https://www.plasticchina.org. 8 Kiki Zhao, “China’s Environmental Woes, in Films That Go Viral, Then Vanish,” New York Times, April 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/world/asia/chinas-environmental-woes-in-films-that-go-viral- then-vanish.html. 9 Avery Trufelman, “Episode 341: National Sword,” 99% Invisible, February 12, 2019, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/national-sword.

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If watching a family retrieve their dinner from a contaminated river filled with dying fish and a baby being born upon a mountain of plastic does not provide enough evidence for the deleterious anthropic influence on the environment, then the hope for data and statistics to do so is thin.

The ubiquitous use of the term “Anthropocene” to describe our current geological time suggests that humanity as a whole, and human nature, is to blame. It also reflects the influence the human imprint has had on the global environment and the Earth’s system to the point that it rivals some of the greatest forces of nature. However, this normative usage is problematic. It is inarguable that the actions of humankind have become a dominate influence over the climate and the environment, but it is more accurately the actions taken by a specific set of individuals (those in authoritative positions of systems of power), as demonstrated by the recycling infrastructures in both the United States and China, to exploit the environment over time for capital gain that are blameworthy.10

Even so, no matter where the responsibility lies, the earth, under the influence of human action, is operating in a state without precedent, and if we collectively do not act as its stewards and leave the current model of development left unscrutinized, then,

Contrary to the end of the Cretaceous period, or Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, the Anthropocene shock is not the result of a foreign body that strikes the Earth from outside and derails its geological trajectory. It is our own model of development, our industrial modernity, which, having claimed to free itself from the limits of the planet, is striking Earth like a boomerang.11

10 According to “The Carbon Majors Database” report released in 2017, “Over half of global industrial emissions since human-induced climate change was officially recognized can be traced to just 25 corporate and state producing entities.” (Dr. Paul Griffin, “The Carbon Majors Database,” CDP, July 2017: 8, https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb- c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/ Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1499691240.) 11 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptist Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, translated by David Fernback, London: Verso, 2016.

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Humanity’s progress is a double-edged sword: it does not only lead to innovation, the expansion of the imagination, and therefore, new knowledge, but also to barbarism, the possibility of forgetting, and the loss of transindividuation. As French philosopher Bernard Stiegler states in The

Neganthropocene, “A society, whatever its form, is above all an apparatus for the production of reality,”12 therefore, the Anthropocene, “corresponds to industrial capitalism, where calculation prevails as a criterion of decision-making—as such, this constitutes the advent of nihilism.”13 This nihilism is manifest in the overarching feeling of ill-being experienced in this world. This sense of unease is exemplified by the younger generation’s inability to imagine or even dream of a future, which the words of a fifteen-year-old boy named Florian epitomize:

You really take no account of what happens to us. When I talk to young people of my generation, those within two or three years of my own age, they all say the same thing: we no longer have the dream of starting a family, of having children, or a trade, or ideals, as you yourselves did when you were teenagers. All that is over and done with, because we’re sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the last, before the end.14

These are chilling words—not only due to their lack of affectation but also to the resignation to the end of life on Earth as we know it that they hold within them. Florian, along with others of his generation, does not feel cared for by older generations—who have been able to dream of the future and even see those dreams come to fruition—and does not have any hope for a future, and, therefore, does not fight for one. The imperative question of how to rouse care of the environment and care of the future becomes a question of how to rouse care of the self.

12 Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, ed. and trans. Daniel Ross, (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 71. 13 Ibid, 37. The industrial capitalism Stiegler refers to here goes by another name: algorithmic governmentality, which is “the possibility of governing users-consumers’ future behaviors by exploiting past information on them. Such traces (e.g., location, clicks, scrolling), when massively collected, are now used to algorithmically build predictive models for anticipating subsequent activities” (Le foucaliden, September 1, 2017). 14 Ibid, 233.

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Therefore, it becomes essential to challenge the narratives of our daily lives, to seek out alternative forms, to think critically, and to demand the engendering, over the production, of reality.

Although Plastic China is not viewable in the country it features, its presence in the world had an indirect, if not direct, impact on the Chinese government’s decision to ban the import of foreign plastics. By censoring Wang’s film, China denies the “United Nation of Plastic Wastes” a part in its national narrative, but by reversing this policy, it has created a new narrative, one that features China as the vanguard of trash regulation. National Sword sent America’s recycling industry—worth $100 billion15—into a downward spiral. As the United States scrambles to find a new market for their waste, more and more countries are taking up the ban (Malaysia, Thailand, and India have all announced they will not import plastic). The new recycling crisis is an example of what Stiegler refers to as a pharmakon: while it increases the amount of waste that ends up in landfills and causes municipalities to cut back on their recycling programs,16 it also causes a bifurcation in the recycling infrastructure that has the potential to lead to new policies and improved practices, and, therefore, a new narrative, in the United States.

Even though Plastic China carved out space for new narratives regarding the recycling industry, there is room for stories like Yi-Jie’s to affect viewers on a deeper sensory level by utilizing multimodal digital technology to create shared lived experiences. In his article, “Uses and Abuses of

Environmental Memory,” Lawrence Buell defines “environmental memory” as “the sense (whether or not conscious, whether or not accurate, whether or not shared) of environments as lived experience in the fourth dimension—i.e., the intimation of human life and history as unfolding within the context of human embeddedness in webs of shifting environmental circumstances of

15 Porter, “US Recycling Industry.” 16 Micaela Marini Higgs, “America’s new recycling crisis, explained by an expert,” Vox, April 2, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/4/2/18290956/recycling-crisis-china-plastic-operation-national- sword.

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39 some duration, whether these be finite time spans (a lifetime, a generation, an epoch, a dynasty), or stretching back indefinitely into remotest pre-history.”17 What Buell calls for here is a more conscientious and less carefree inhabitation of the Earth—the cultivation of the ability to recognize that what was done before has shaped the environment one lives in now and that one’s actions in the here and now will shape the Earth’s future viability. Environmental memory must be transindividual across space and time; it must be full of robust, shared conceptions regarding the environment’s history and trajectory.

Every individual experience is a story waiting to be told. Used purposefully and with technique, storytelling can contribute to inclusion, establish connection, and enact change. Digital technologies that allow the consumer to not only consume the piece but also interact with it, like virtual and augmented reality, can be used to emphasize the environment in the lived experience.

Digital storytelling is in a unique position to represent the “human embeddedness in webs of shifting environmental circumstances” Buell refers to. An individual living in the twenty-first century has the ability to put on a pair of VR goggles and not only transport themselves to another environmental circumstance but also engage with that circumstance in an intimate, personalized way.

In the same respect, the individual can inhabit a present circumstance different than their own, gaining insight into how an individual spatially distant from them experiences the environment, or one yet to come, gaining an understanding of the potential existence humans may (or may not) have on Earth.

The decades-long debate between the climatologists who say that human actions have negatively impacted the environment to the endpoint of our own species’ obsolescence and the climate deniers who reject scientific consensus in order to maintain the economy’s status quo may

17 Lawrence Buell, “Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory,” Contesting Environmental Imaginaries 4, (March 13, 2017): 96, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004335080_007.

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40 have come to an end, but the end of doubt does not immediately translate into adequate response.

The quest to prove whether global warming is happening due to human actions transforms into the quest to mobilize the accepting public into calling for and making change. According to Buell,

Although self-evidently the environmental humanities lack standing to preach to experimental psychologists, sociologists, and climatologists on matters of fact, the case is quite otherwise in respect to the assessment of the shaping—and misshaping—of effective environmental memory at whatever level. Here such qualitative factors as the power of rhetoric, image, narrative, and belief to shape discourse, move minds, and prompt action become much more central, indeed preeminent.18

Buell entrusts the arts with his hope of crafting a shared environmental memory. Untethered from technicality, the humanities have more flexibility in framing environmental memory. While attempting to raise the social consciousness in relation to the environment’s well-being, Buell points out that building a collective environmental memory, separate from one’s personal memory, across a vast time scale, also risks “transmit[ting] itself as nobody’s memory, as a generic condition of theoretic rather than immediate import for an individual lifeline.”19 Although this is certainly a risk, it is one worth taking. A narrative can use personalization to transform biogeographical memory into lived experience for the reader, listener, viewer, and participant. The ability to tell a story is the ability to exchange experience with another person.

In Collisions, 2016, a virtual reality (VR) documentary experience by Australian multimedia artist Lynette Wallworth, Nyarri Morgan, an indigenous elder of the Western Australian Martu tribe, exchanges his story with the participant. In the 1950s, Morgan’s world collided with the cutting-edge of Western science and technology when he witnessed what he thought was a visit from his god.

What Morgan initially thought was a deity was, in fact, an atomic bomb test conducted by the British government. Throughout the experience, the participant is at moments a passive voyeur and at others an active agent (re)living the incident alongside Morgan. To create a truly immersive

18 Ibid, 97. 19 Ibid, 100.

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41 experience, Wallworth utilizes sound—the crackle of fire, the snap of a twig—to attract the participant’s attention to key details that may otherwise be overlooked in a 360-degree environment.

As Morgan says, “We saw the spirit made the kangaroos all fall down on the ground as a gift to us of easy hunting, so we took the kangaroos and we ate them, and the people were sick, and the spirit left,”20 the participant becomes immersed in the very moment Morgan witnesses—what he first thinks is a miracle but later learns is a nuclear explosion. The participant sees and feels what Morgan must have seen and felt. Like Morgan, the towering, billowing cloud, the quake of the earth, and the kangaroos’ choreographed dance as they fall to the ground and then lie still evoke awe in the participant’s body.

Collisions, in many ways, is paradigmatic of culture critic Walter Benjamin’s definition of storytelling. In “Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” published in 1936,

Benjamin laments the decline of storytelling and the possibility of shared experience. For him, a real story “contains, openly or covertly, something useful … a moral … some practical advice … a proverb or maxim. In every sense, the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today, ‘having counsel’ is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing.”21 The invention of the printing press, along with the

20 Wallworth, “Lynette.” Nyarri Morgan’s story is not one of climate change, per se, but it is an example of how human activity certainly leads to it. This is exactly what makes it an exemplary piece of environmental memory–forming storytelling. Through Morgan’s story, we can see how Western technology completely altered the lives of a people who have lived symbiotically with nature for tens of thousands of years. At first they believed the death of the kangaroos was a gift from their god, but they quickly learned the cost of eating their radioactive-contaminated bodies as many became sick and died. Although the British government conducted a cleanup in 1967, twenty-one pits containing thousands of tons of plutonium-contaminated debris were left untouched. (Alan Parkinson, “Maralinga—Australia’s nuclear waste cover-up,” interview by Robyn Williams, Ockham’s Razor, ABC, September 2, 2007, transcript, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/maralinga---australias-nuclear-waste-cover- up/3221322#transcript.) 21 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 364.

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42 industrial revolution and the age of mechanical reproduction, which begot mass media, introduced a crisis to the art of storytelling and a new form of communication: information.22

The distinguishing characteristic of this new form of communication is its “claim to prompt verifiability,” which Benjamin sees as “incompatible with the spirit of storytelling.”23 Due to its innate plausibility, information does not inspire discourse. Therefore, a reader cannot imbue the news with their own experience; instead, the news is a regurgitation of what the media deems notable. However, the utilization of digital technology, as showcased by Collisions, distills modern day storytelling. Both Morgan and Wallworth have counsel for their participants. For Wallworth, VR is a way for her audience to experience a new sensation for the first time, a moment she knows “gets seared into memory,” which is why she feels VR and storytelling belong together. VR’s capability to infuse the viewer with a memory that is not their own only strengthens the power of the story to

“reshape us collectively.”24 For Morgan, VR is a medium for him to share his story—the moment

Western technology collided with a generations-long Aboriginal tradition of fire-lighting—with the world, particularly with politicians and world leaders. But it was not until Wallworth and her team came into his life that he could tell his story through a digital platform:

[Collisions] is something of a gift sent out from a private world. It contains an old story, held close till now. It is a technological message in a bottle to a world that teeters on the edge of climate catastrophe, but it is a message shared with fundamental hope in our capacity to contemplate more carefully the consequences of our actions.25

As a VR documentary, Collisions does cater to those privileged enough to attend film festivals and site-specific events, but the limited scope of its audience does not detract from the fact that

Morgan’s powerful story deserves to be told. Collisions provided Morgan with the opportunity to

22 Ibid, 365. 23 Ibid, 365. 24 “The Film,” Collisions, Collisionsvr.com, accessed May 12, 2019, http://www.collisionsvr.com/about-the- film. 25 Ibid.

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43 leave Australia for the first time to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, the

Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty meetings held in Vienna, Austria, and the Treaty on the

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons meetings—which led to its adoption on July 7, 2019, in New York

City at the United Nations. Morgan waited more than sixty years to tell his story, but he waited because he knew the power it would have once it was released into the world. Without Wallworth transporting the immersive technology to his remote location, Morgan may never have shared his story in such a way that provided a distant audience with an intimate sense of his experience and his home. Collisions is an exemplary piece of environmental memory–forming storytelling. Not only does it share Morgan’s personal experience with the nuclear age in a remote part of Australia but also demonstrates how VR encourages a dialogue and allows the participant to embody another’s experience and use it to transform a bleak reality in the world.

The crisis Benjamin believes information introduced to storytelling is further complicated in the present day by the unprecedented speed at which information is disseminated and proliferated.

Stiegler adopts Jonathan Crary’s concept of “24/7 capitalism” to demonstrate how this speed

“completely reconfigures the globalized industrial infrastructure”:

The reticular computer raises anew all those questions first posed by Socrates in relation to the question of the pharmakon, multiplying them by a factor of four million, which is the difference between … the speed of nerve impulses that circulates at 50 metres per second along the nerves that are the reticulation of our bodies, and … the speed of information on fibre optic networks running along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean … These questions put back into play the entire relationship between technics, knowledge, politics, and economics (that is, powers). … In fact, the overtaking of the speed of reason by an understanding that has become automatic, brings the problem of proletarianization, which every pharmakon always involves, to that ultimate point that is completed by nihilism.26

26 Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 44.

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The question of the pharmakon Stiegler refers to is found in Plato’s Phaedrus. It is a question of whether writing, the first technical memory aid, harms or aids memory (especially the capacity to think for oneself).27

Stiegler views writing as a tertiary retention, an artifact of personal or collective experience and learning that makes recall or recognition possible. Although the very interactivity of technology disindividuates and deprives individuals of their imaginations and protentional capabilities, it is also the same technology that cultivates the mind. For Stiegler, “Every work is a pharmakon insofar as it is contingent, accidental, and hence insofar as, as a lesion of meaning, it inaugurates a new age of meaning.”28 In other words, technology is a tool to cultivate polysemy. Stiegler calls for the use of mnemotechnics to create “a new economic and political rationality that creates a process of production in a broad sense

… a system of neganthropic bifurcations of every kind, founded on works of every kind, including works of art.”29 During a lecture delivered at Columbia University on April 18, 2019, following the exhibition of Collisions at the Lenfest Center of the Arts, Wallworth described her responsibility as an artist as the duty to use technology to make a dent—that is, a lesion—in the world around her.

When I’m dealing with technology and it’s driving me crazy, I think about Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper, because the role of many artists over centuries, is to explore and work with new technologies. It just so happens that as time passes, we forget that the technologies of different times were at one point new and difficult. And in Leonardo’s time, the challenging new technology was oil paint. I think about that when I’m dealing with new technology and the thing it should be doing but it isn’t doing, and I know I have to wrangle it, because new technology is always buggy, it’s always fraught, but we work with it because of the possibility of doing something that we hadn’t yet been able to do.30

27 Ibid, 20. 28 Stiegler, The Neganthropocence, 97. 29 Ibid, 101. 30 Lynette Wallworth, “Lynette Wallworth,” Lecture, Columbia University, Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, New York, April 18, 2019.

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Without directly saying so, Wallworth emphasizes technology’s role as a pharmakon. As an artist, she sees it as her duty to draw attention to the important things that are often overlooked, to “try to bridge gaps, even cultural gaps, gaps of knowledge, spaces between the world that we know and the world that others are living in,”31 and she has done so through her interactive art installations and

VR documentaries, like Collisions, that explore new narratives in climate change in order to provide a way to frame it, she says, that “actually could get some traction, could sort of hold weight, could pull focus.”32

As cognitive technologies develop, we avail ourselves of their services, delegating more and more knowledge to the apparatuses and the service industries that “network them, control them, formalize them, model them, and perhaps even destroy them” and divest ourselves of our agency.33

The hegemony of the industrial exteriorization of memory, Stiegler argues, leads to the

“obsolescence of the human,”34 perhaps not existentially (yet), but certainly phenomenologically.

The more consumers rely on technologies that only a select few understand and know how to operate, the more disempowered they become, losing their ability to function in the world. Here,

Stiegler suggests that the exteriorization of memory, therefore knowledge and information, carried to its extreme turns the human into a superfluous entity.

… we will lose not only our know-how but also our know-how-to-live-well. The only thing left for us will be the passivity of blind consumption, devoid of knowledge and its rewards. We will become impotent if not obsolete—so long as knowledge is what empowers humanity.… The consumer, in short, becomes nothing more than an instance of purchasing power, which is to say of heedless consumerism, and thus an “agent” in the heedless destruction of the world.35

31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Bernard Stiegler, “Memory,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 68. 34 Ibid, 68. 35 Ibid, 68–69.

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If we, humans, are enthralled to “blind consumption,” how are we to provide not just for our own needs but the Earth’s as well? If we continue to divest ourselves of knowledge, we will become automatons, thoughtlessly consuming product after product. In order to advocate for the environment, we must be able to advocate for ourselves. However bleak Stiegler paints the technical milieu, he also sees a redemptive quality in the “computational technical memory aids—digital hypomnemata,” which differ from “photography, phonography, cinematography … in that they create an ‘associated hypomnesic milieu’ in which ‘receivers are placed in the position of senders.’”36 These microtechnologies associate, rather than dissociate, consumption with production, which means that if you know how to use these technologies to consume something, you can also use them to produce something.

When associated with the act of embodying memory (anamnesis), “hypomnemata” are reminders, notes, commentaries, and the like that utilize memory to create meaningful symbolic practices and collective formations. When “dissociated from anamnesis, they advance the interests of the culture industries (Adorno and Horkheimer) and of ‘control societies’ (Deleuze).”37 The internet age is one that marks the end of an era of dissociated technical milieus, “milieus that separate the functions of producers and consumers,” divest them of their knowledge and, therefore, their “capacity to participate in the socialization of the world through its transformation.”38 These digital technologies, which mark the demassification of media, create a new age of recollection in which memory once again becomes shareable between individuals not only in the present moment but also across generations. By empowering individuals to produce as well as consume and have a voice in shaping their own world, the decentralized forms of media are also the gateway to creating a collective environmental memory.

36 Ibid, 64. 37 Ibid, 66. 38 Ibid, 83.

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One way to empower individuals to produce is to purposefully leave out specific information in the story. By doing so, the storyteller provokes more questions than answers, inviting the listener to continue the conversation and fill the gaps with their own experience, which only adds to the story’s richness. Each time a story is told a new opportunity is created for another individual’s experience to be added to it. Yet, according to Buell, evoking an environmental memory may seem like a solitary venture, as if the storyteller is speaking into a void. As told by Buell, Aldo Leopold, an

American wildlife biologist, who is “sometimes called the father of modern environmental ethics, declared that ‘one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds’ (Leopold 1991, 237). For the conscienceful [sic] scientist, that is, the awakening of environmental memory exacts a high price: distress at land abuse and shrinking biodiversity others seem not to notice.”39 How, then, do we get other people to notice?

Although Leopold’s “world of wounds” is reflected in the feeling of ill-being experienced in the world, as described by Florian, it is also reflected in Stiegler’s belief that wounds can be the catalyst for necessary bifurcation. In Nyarri Morgan’s case, he had the opportunity to share his wound with a large audience—specifically a group of policymakers—and enact change, thanks to

Wallworth’s dedication to drawing attention to the overlooked. Again, this is where environmental narrative through digital storytelling will aid the creation of a collective environmental memory. By crafting media that not only disseminates scientific facts involving the viability of the environment but also encourages transindividual interactions detailing how environmental crises effect individuals on an intimate, personal level, readers, listeners, viewers, and participants will be encouraged to draw their own conclusions and feel less isolated in their wounds, allowing more environmental knowledge that constitutes intergenerational value to accumulate.

39 Buell, “Uses and Abuses,” 97–98.

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Toward the end of Collisions, as we watch Nyarri Morgan—full of intention—light the desert on fire, a process used for hunting that has been passed down through 14,000 generations of the

Martu people, we hear the narrator say, “There’s what we know and there’s what we come to know, and then there’s what we do after.”40 This is a statement of counsel. Collisions utilizes new technology to bring to the forefront something of ancient origin: the Martu people’s sense of stewardship. It is a story of how we can look after something over a stretch of time.

We cannot ignore the reality that is there in front of us, no matter what it is called. It may be inconvenient, it may be difficult, and it may require a dramatic change in the way mankind lives its life and harnesses its resources, but it is not insurmountable. By utilizing digital technology, we can revitalize our internal lives and have a say in the shaping of our world and the world to come. In order to create a world in which there is a shared, rich understanding of biogeographical memory and an appreciation for our embeddedness in shifting environmental circumstances, we need to create artwork that allows consumers to inhabit and understand the environment’s past, present, and future circumstances. Through the creation of a collective environmental memory via digital storytelling, we can shape our world to be one where experiences like Ji-Yie’s and Morgan’s—which demonstrate how we affect and connect to others spatiotemporally distant from ourselves, raise consciousness, question our accepted knowledge of how to do, live, and think, and rouse change in our model of development, policies, and infrastructure—are shared, celebrated, and proliferated.

Alicia Daniele is a recovering New Jerseyan living in New York City, where she works as an editor in the Department of Marketing Communications at NYU. She has a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College, and she will soon earn an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU. Alicia's research interests include the politics of time, memory studies, digital storytelling, and the representation of the environment in the media.

40 Lynette Wallworth, Collisions, virtual reality, Coco Films, 2016.

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