Media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis MEDIA/ENV on August 26-27, 2026 in Amsterdam, Netherlands - Conference Index

Media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis MEDIA/ENV on August 26-27, 2026 in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis (MEDIA/ENV) August 26, 2026 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

What are the planetary burdens of media technology? What cultural and aesthetic frameworks shape how nature is depicted on screen?

The international symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis confronts the question of how media both represent and materially transform the natural environment in a warming world.

Prominent speakers from three continents will present the latest research on topics ranging from the materiality of film and the finitude of resources to images of extraction, film archives, the colonial and environmental history of photochemical cinema, media’s role in the environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration, and the ecological footprint of digital screen culture and artificial intelligence.

A roundtable brings together perspectives from the media industry, cultural institutions, and archives on how these sectors are responding to the concrete environmental challenges of media tech.

In collaboration with Rialto VU, the symposium also features a short film program exploring the extractive history of celluloid, food production, and oceanic dead zones.

Are you interested in media studies, environmental humanities, science, technology, history, or the arts? Whether you are a scholar, student, practitioner or simply curious, this symposium invites you to join us in rethinking media’s planetary footprint from the archive to the algorithm, from screen to stream.

Speakers

Panel 1: analog

Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool): Photography’s Broken Contract: Environmental Relations and Technological Imaging

Elena Past (Wayne State University, Detroit): Fire and the Archive: Climate Change, the Mediterranean, and the Istituto LUCE

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (University College London): Reverse Engineering Climate Collapse: Or Doing Film History Backwards

Panel 2: digital

Fieke Jansen (University of Amsterdam): Securing the Market: AI, Predicting Hazards, and Managing Vulnerability

Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna (University of Lodz): Intertwining Scopes: Assessing the Environmental Footprint of an AI-Driven Art Project

Hunter Vaughan (Emerson College, Boston): Sustainable Digitalisation? The Social Threats and Environmental Costs of a Digital Screen Culture

Panel 3: extraction and acceleration

Wu Chi-Yu (Media artist, Taipei): Does Celluloid Dream of Camphor Forests? Colonial Extraction and the Material Prehistory of the Moving Image

Salomé Lopes Coelho (Utrecht University): Ecologies of Extractive Violence Across Non-Fiction Film

Anne-Katrin Weber (University of Lausanne): Entangled Flows: Automobility and Television in Postwar Switzerland

Panel 4: finitude and futures

Ryo Okubo (Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo): Materiality and Finitude: Munesuke Mita’s Theory of Information and Japanese Media Studies

María Vélez-Serna (Independent scholar): Operative Images and Environmental Futures in Extractive Landscapes

Sigrid Kannengießer (University of Münster): Environmental Perspectives on Digital Technologies and AI Infrastructures

Panel 5: junior scholars

Ischa Borger (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Carbon Capture Capitalism: Against the Aesthetics of Profitable Post-Apocalyptics

Tessa Holscher (Utrecht University): “Whatever is Capable of Breaking our Hearts is also Capable of Moving us to Change”: Invoking the Eco-Eschatology of Honeyland and “From Atop A Mountain”

Valentina Ochner (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Big Tech and AI Systems in Global Climate Governance

Roundtable discussion: Environmental Impacts of Media Tech in Practice

Jasper Snoeren (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)

Alex de Vries-Gao (Digiconomist / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Tobias Wilbrink (GreenScreen Netherlands)

Film Screening

  • Stories of Celluloid: Phantom Gaze / Terra Nullius Data (Wu Chi-Yu, 2025)
  • Dead Zones (Suzette Bousema, 2025)
  • Agrilogistics / Bliss Point (Gerard Ortin, 2021 / 2023)

Name: Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam
Website: https://ehc-amsterdam.nl/

Bringing together students, scholars, and members of the public interested in humanities perspectives on the environment, the Environmental Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam – founded in 2016 – aims to foster an exchange of ideas. Grounded in the realization that today’s environmental crisis calls for interdisciplinary approaches, we stimulate conversations among the humanities and the natural and social sciences.
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