Introduction: Media and Climate

Abstract

Beyond the important insight that digital media exert a material influence over climates, this special issue marks two acute developments as central to the ambiguous relation of the terms media and climate: the proliferation of data-driven technologies across environments and a coinciding desire to seek out a politics and ethics beyond the history of Western humanism. The introduction thus sets out to frame this special issue’s interest in media and climate in relation to an emerging body of critical-media scholarship focused on the agency of technological and environmental processes, while also arguing for a specificity posed in relation to the material histories of race, colonialism, and dispossession shaping legacies of “human” agency and its future possibilities. We consider the aesthetic challenges posed by climate change, whether through conflicting media temporalities, new media art’s ongoing culpability and participation in extractive techniques, or the overarching effects of media on social, perceptual, and cognitive registers, both globally and individually. By framing the contributions in this special issue within our introductory essay as integral to understanding the parameters of technical, political, and social approaches to climate knowledge in the Now, Ongoing Past, and Indeterminate Future, we seek to map the stakes of promoting an even-greater interdisciplinary shift in specificity regarding the capacious dimensions of environment and media through their ready proximity to other aspects that bear on climate-related issues, including finance, technology, politics, colonialism, race, information, affect, and culture.