August 26-27, 2026

VU Amsterdam

Organized by the VU Chair for Media and Culture 

About the symposium:

What are the planetary burdens of media technologies? 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Screening:

Stories of Celluloid: Phantom Gaze / Terra Nullius Data (2025, Wu Chi-Yu)

Dead Zones (2023, Suzette Bousema)

Agrilogistics (2021, Gerard Ortin)

Bliss Point (2023, Gerard Ortin)

To join the symposium, please register via https://mediaenv.ehc-amsterdam.nl/.

For questions contact Judith Keilbach, VU Amsterdam, j.i.keilbach@vu.nl