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"Vaughan, Hunter"
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The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology's climate impacts
The climate impacts of the information and communications technology sector—and Big Data especially—is a topic of growing public and industry concern, though attempts to quantify its carbon footprint have produced contradictory results. Some studies argue that information and communications technology's global carbon footprint is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, requiring urgent regulation and sectoral degrowth. Others argue that information and communications technology's growth is largely decoupled from its carbon emissions, and so provides valuable climate solutions and a model for other industries. This article assesses these debates, arguing that, due to data frictions and incommensurate study designs, the question is likely to remain irresolvable at the global scale. We present six methodological factors that drive this impasse: fraught access to industry data, bottom-up vs. top-down assessments, system boundaries, geographic averaging, functional units, and energy efficiencies. In response, we propose an alternative approach that reframes the question in spatial and situated terms: A relational footprinting that demarcates particular relationships between elements—geographic, technical, and social—within broader information and communications technology infrastructures. Illustrating this model with one of the global Internet's most overlooked components—subsea telecommunication cables—we propose that information and communications technology futures would be best charted not only in terms of quantified total energy use, but in specifying the geographical and technical parts of the network that are the least carbon-intensive, and which can therefore provide opportunities for both carbon reductions and a renewed infrastructural politics. In parallel to the politics of (de)growth, we must also consider different network forms.
Journal Article
Mutants We All: Jean-Louis Schefer and our Cinematic Civilization
What does it say when our civilization’s greatest myth claims that God abandoned the human form because it was without redemption? [...]what traumatic scar on our culture and art has this left? Serge Daney writes, in his assessment of the influence of film-going on his own childhood: I know of few expressions more beautiful than the one coined by Jean-Louis Schefer when, in L’homme ordinaire du cinéma, he speaks about the “films that have watched our childhood.” Because it is one thing to learn to watch movies as a “professional”—only to verify that movies concern us less and less—but it is another to live with those movies that watched us grow and that have seen us, early hostages of our future biographies, already entangled in the snare of our history. According to Schefer’s argument, there is no surprise that this new technology of the moving image should generate film texts that obsess over the technological motors that make possible both society’s technological practices and the technological arts. According to its documentation in Theory Kit, the online database: “The Tracking Shot in Kapo” is one of the last texts written by French movie critic Serge Daney before his death in June 1992.
Journal Article
Centripetal and Centrifugal Systems: Currents in Trans-Atlantic Film-Philosophy
Este artigo propõe uma investigação analítica sobre a relação filosófico-binária, e historicamente dialéctica, entre a metafísica e a filosofia do cinema abstracta Continental (principalmente francesa), com a abordagem mais cognitivo racional da Anglo-Saxónica. Os objectivos deste artigo são três: 1) fornecer um resumo delineado das principais vozes, nas últimas três décadas, da filosofia do cinema internacional; 2) contextualizar as abordagens filosóficas do cinema dentro de uma vasta genealogia internacional; e 3) sistematizar as similaridades e diferenças entre essas abordagens. Em última análise, conclui-se, que estas duas grandes “escolas” poderiam ser entendidas de acordo com os modelos de sistemas centrípetos e centrífugos: enquanto a abordagem Anglo-Saxónica usa a análise cognitiva para ancorar empiricamente a nossa compreensão do cinema, de acordo com a lógica do racionalismo, a abordagem francesa permite uma abordagem mais progressista e inovadora que abraça a natureza transformadora da forma cinematográfica, a fim de teorizar como esta desafiou as convenções filosóficas e, mudou a nossa compreensão da arte e dos modos desta se relacionar com o mundo. “Centripetal and Centrifugal Systems: Currents in Trans-Atlantic Film-Philosophy” offers an analytic survey of the philosophical binary and historically dialectical relationship between the metaphysical and abstract Continental (primarily French) film-philosophy, and the more rational Anglo-American cognitive approach. This essay's goals are threefold: 1) to give an outlined summary of the major voices in the last three decades of international film-philosophy; 2) to contextualize philosophical approaches to cinema within a larger intellectual genealogy; and 3) to systematize the similarities and differences between these approaches. Ultimately, I conclude, these two larger “schools” could be understood according to the models of centripetal and centrifugal systems: whereas the Anglo-American approach uses cognitive analysis to empirically anchor our comprehension of films according to a logic of rationalism, the French approach allows for a more progressive and innovative approach that embraces the transformative nature of film form in order to theorize how it has challenged philosophical conventions and changed our understanding of art and our ways of relating to the world
Journal Article
From Content to Context (and Back Again)
The development of sustainability strategies to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of film production exemplifies the global film industry's attempts to come to terms with the “public good” in the era of anthropogenically accelerated climate change. The study of screen media's complex relationship with environment has been dominated by a focus on media content. Discourse analysis has formed the object of previous studies of environmental management of the media. Planet Placement suggests that, at the very least, a different set of measurements for “success” of media products is required, and that government‐based and independent cultural agencies can assert a strong role in the environmental turn of media production and storytelling. The lack of content management policy arguably reflects the industry's hesitation to be seen by audiences as overly preachy or to be seen by the government as overtly political.
Book Chapter
André Bazin
In the forty years of André Bazin's brief life, he managed to re-map the relationship between the average movie going spectator, the film critic and the cinema industry, insisting that a thoughtful and demanding public could in fact shape the trajectory of cinema as an institution. Bazin developed a unique approach to the arts founded in a combination of Catholic mysticism, intellectual humanism and a combination of existentialism and phenomenology weaned from philosophers of the post-war period. In \"Ontology of the Photographic Image\", first outlined in an article in 1945, Bazin works to situate cinema according to its specific place in the historical evolution of the arts. Bazin has received one of the most systematic drubbings in twentieth-century cultural studies. The social purpose of criticism was further instilled through Bazin's intense interest in the literary journal Esprit. As co-founder in 1951 and editor of the groundbreaking French journal Cahiersducinema, Bazin instilled film criticism with a profound humanism.
Book Chapter
ANDRÉ BAZIN
Bazin has received one of the most systematic drubbings in twentieth-century cultural studies. Noël Carroll, among others, challenges the extravagance of Bazin’s metaphysical notion of cinematic essentialism, while purer structuralists have lambasted Bazin’s idealism for what they claim to be a lack of historical or material criticism.¹ This is not an uncommon reaction to Bazin’s work, a body of writing that is summarized by Bill Nichols as “a dual and perhaps contradictory approach of transcendent spiritualism and sociology” (1976: 151). But how could an approach so replete with sensitivity and humanism, and bearing such a positive influence on film history,
Book Chapter
https://variety.com/2020/film/columns/hollywood-green-environmental-technology-1203490360
Why have these facts not prompted wide-scale change? Because the climate debate is cultural. From the fuel required for cast and crew to travel to the energy dependency of digital post-production, film culture is high in natural resource demand, GHG/carbon emissions, pollution and waste production. From exploitative labor practices to excessive red-carpet awards shows, and throughout the life-cycle of digital devices from precious metal mining to toxic digital dumping grounds, Hollywood plays more the villain than the hero in this narrative.
Newspaper Article
From camera to code: godard, resnais and the problem of representation in film theory
This thesis presents a theory of film representation as a process of organizing relations in order to connote the image's status as a type of representation. It is, thus, a study of film form, the form of its representations. Building from such theoretical sources as Merleau- Ponty and Deleuze, I hope here to use a phenomenological base to build a theory of film semiotics that focuses on the immanent field of film representation, which I will postulate as a structuring of the inter-dependent relationship between the content of representation and the signified source of representation. This relationship is infused through a film text according to various modes of differentiation: between the viewer and viewed, speaker and spoken or what, using principles of phenomenology, I call the problem of subject-object relations. In this study I use this framework of subject-object relations in order to re-conceptualize the problem of film representation and to systematize the fundamental debates in film theory. I will argue that even oppositional theories of film representation can be reconciled through their attempt to understand this immanent field as being organized so as to structure a relationship between the representation and an origin of meaning, or subject-function. This relationship is what I call a system of reference. The filmic subject-function is traditionally located within the camera itself or hi the diegetic subjectivity of a character; I will call these two systems of reference, respectively, objective and subjective representation. And, through a reconstruction of Deleuze's Cinéma project, I will argue that the immanent field of film representation is a constant fluctuation between these two poles, a dialogic circulation of interacting agencies and discourses. This thesis illustrates this fluctuation through a comparative analysis of two French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. I will argue that, illustrating similar goals as one finds in the works of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, these two filmmakers radically deconstruct film codes in order to destroy the conventional division between interior and exterior that is imposed by classical notions of subjectivity.
Dissertation