Lightbulb with planet earth isolated on white background.
Illustration: Yiannis P / Mostphotos

Ecology has become one of the most important concepts in the humanities as well as in the social and natural sciences. No longer limited to a traditional notion of nature and natural environments, the concept of ecology is now also applied with a wider scope, investigating, for example, technological environments and media ecologies, as well as ecologies of perception and cognition. This conceptual expansion of ecology reflects the profound overlapping of natural and technological elements constituting contemporary environments. The current situation of environmentality demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also entail an ecological transformation of thought itself is required.

Programme

20 May

09:00-09:05 Introduction
9:05-10:20

Erich Hörl: 

“Environmentalitarian Time: Temporality and Modes of Worlding under the Technoecological Condition”

10:20-10:30 Break

10:30-11:30

Jesper Olsson: 

“Shifting Scales, Posthuman Figures: ‘Ecologization’ in Contemporary Poetry”

Solveig Daugaard:

”Media Ecologies of Literature in the Digital Age: New Interfaces and Alternative Infrastructures”

Per Israelson:

”The Last Days: Haunted Futures in the Age of Media Franchising”

11:30-11:40 Break

11:40-12:20

Piotr Wajda:

“From Texan Barrens to Nordic Forests. The Ecologic Shift in Depictions of a Conflict Between Human and Nature in New North European Horror Films.”

Jonas Andersson Schwarz:

“If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next:
Rethinking the Ecological Role of Media Systems”

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30

Christian Schwinghammer:

”Eco-relationality and the Aesthetico-political Question. Towards a Critical Worldmaking under Technological Conditions”

Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen & Daria Skjoldager-Nielsen:

”Overflow Feedback in Hotel Pro Forma’s NeoArctic”

Aljoscha Weskott & Ute Kalender:

”Towards an Understanding of Experimental Ethics in Media Ecology: Updating Susan Sontag's Concept of an ‘Ecology of Images’”

14:30-15:00 Paus

15:00-16:00

Kari Ekman:

”Shooting or protecting? Interpretations of Wilderness in Novels Taking Place in Svalbard for Young Adults”

Milan Stürmer:

”Cheap Future: Political Economy after the Great Environmental Switch”

Joakim Wrethed:

“The Anti-Ecology of Nietzschean Aesthetics in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island”

21 May

10:00-11:00

Agnieszka Kiejziewicz: 

”From the Perspective of a Bird. Rei Hayama’s Experimental Films and Ecological Turn in Japanese Audiovisual Art”

Vendela Grundell: 

”Connect, Spread, Change: Questions about Normality in an Ecology of Disability Art Exhibitions”

Gregers Andersen: 

“Rethinking the Machinocene. A Critique of Planetary Computerisation”

11:00-11:20 Break

11:20-12:20

Yannick Schütte: 

”Response-ability: (Re-)acting within Patterns of Unintentional Coordination”

Niklas Egberts: 

”Techno-ecological Storytelling in Ian Cheng’s Emissaries”

Bethany Berard: 

“Photography and the Production of Visual Ecologies of Information”

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30

Gianfranco Selgas: 

“Ecological Contiguities: Post-anthropocentric Speculations in Contemporary Latin American Verbal and Visual Arts”

Heidrun Führer: 

”Football as Performative Intermediality”

Stefano Mazzilli-Daechsel: 

”The Maker Movement and the Problematic of General Ecology”

14:30-15:00 Break

15:00-15:40

Jakob Claus:

“Ecologisation and the Notion of Scale”

Karolina Sobecka:

“Geoengineering Experiments as Socio-technical Rehearsals”

15:45-16:15

Closing remarks by Erich Hörl

About Erich Hörl

Erich Hörl is one of the leading theorists of what he in a recent article has called the “great environmental switch” of the contemporary sociotechnological condition. Currently he is working on a general ecology of media and technology, focusing on a historical-systematic outlining of a techno ecology of participation. He publishes internationally on the history as well as the problems and challenges of the contemporary technological condition. Erich Hörl is the editor of General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Read more about Erich Hörl at the website of the Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Organising committee:

Karin Dirke, Claudia Egerer, Per Israelson, Christer Johansson, Johan Klingborg.