32e0

Artificial Intelligence and the Politics of Imagination

by IssuesJournal
Vol. 32, Issue 2 / 2024
Topic: Artificial Intelligence and the Politics of Imagination
Coordinators: Horea POENAR

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Politics of imagination

Horea POENAR

The AI revolution Ended Yesterday. A Story about Obsolescent Machines

Doru POP

Manifested as an attractive science fiction trope, the fear that artificial intelligence is going to be at war with homo sapiens, that human beings might be replaced by their own creations, are cultural anxieties amplifed by the technologies of the new millennium, with various autonomous systems driven by AI taking over our lives. Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere, apparently changing humanity and even evolution. Overviewing three recent productions, Atlas (2024), The Creator (2023) and The Beast (2023), used as examples for showcasing a different approaches to problems related to machine intelligence, military power, political systems and human emotions, this contribution explores the various possible expressions of our deep distrust towards intelligent machines. Using a version of Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadology”, the author proposes a NOMAD(ID)eological interpretation, a distinct methodological approach dealing with “nomadic” transformations of the future of mankind. As indicated by the evolution of the cinematic machine patented by the Lumière brothers in 1864, we must observe that there is an inherent technological plateau for all human technologies. After 160 years existence, we are basically using the same cinema apparatus and, just as the “cinematographic revolution” faded from its very invention, the author suggests that the “AI revolution” has simultaneously reached its peak and utter end. The conclusion of this contribution, based on the theory of stagnation, remains that our fears about AI are based on the false premise that this new technology will result in an unexpected outcome. Using the comparison with the cinematic machine, AI technologies have reached their evolution potential from the very moment they were created, they are capable of endlessly generating parrot-like texts, allowing us to create funny images and videos, amusing us with their mimetic potential and incessantly calculating data that humans have created in the past.

Keywords: Nomadology, Artificial intelligence, technological stagnation, techno-anxieties, cyberfeminism, science fiction films, Atlas (2024), The Creator (2023), The Beast (2023)

The algorithmic art: Exploring the intersection of human imagination and AI technology

Alicia J. M. COLSON, Eduard-Claudiu GROSS

Today, many people perceive that algorithmic art is the result of recent innovations. The key word here is ‘perceive’ as neither Frieder Nake (born 1938) nor Harold Cohen (1928–2016), the pioneers of algorithmic art, are rarely mentioned within the current epistemic context. Nake’s first public contribution to computer art was in three exhibitions in 1965. Obviously, Nake’s and Cohen’s roles are fundamental, and their contributions must be considered in any discussion seeking to understand the role of human imagination in algorithmic creation. The present paper aims to address the human role in the creation of art by means of generative artificial intelligence. The creative sector appears to be gradually embracing AI-generated content as one of many categories of images, but it is clear that the worldviews of those involved have consequences on both the AI tools created and the outcome as ‘art’. The complex relationship between algorithmic autonomy and human agency is discussed in order to establish any underlying power dynamics and disparities in the technological environment of the ‘art’ world. This discussion utilizes the case study approach so to examine current applications of AI in creative campaigns in order to provide real-world examples and empirical data.

Keywords: Generative AI, Authorship, Human-machine synergy, Human Imagination, Creativity
The Ambivalence of Imagining the “OUTSIDE”: On Nick Land’s Libidinal Materialism

The Ambivalence of Imagining the “OUTSIDE”: On Nick Land’s Libidinal Materialism

Mihai ȚAPU

This paper seeks to offer a critical assessment of Nick Land’s early writings in light of his views on “libidinal materialism”. Being a relatively niche figure in the 1990s and 2000s, Nick Land rose to prominence in the 2010s due to the publication of his collected writings as Fanged Noumena, in 2011, which revealed him as one of the forerunners of accelerationism, an ambivalent political theory which promoted the need to accelerate “through” (rather than “against”) the elements of capitalism in order to reach a “post-capitalist” future. The aim of this paper is to shed light on an earlier concept developed by Land in his first book, The Thirst for Annihilation, that of “libidinal materialism”. Although Land’s popularity, both in popular culture and in academic discussions, has slowly grown in the last decade, most of the analyses concerning his philosophy revolve around his specific form of Deleuzo-Guattarian-infused “accelerationism”, marginalizing his initial interest in Georges Bataille, the central figure of Thirst for Annihilation. Thus, the present paper attempts to analyze, through a close reading of Land’s first book, some of the author’s first philosophical explorations, such as his discontents with the style of academic philosophical writing, his rejection of Kantian transcendentalism in favor of Bataillean “expenditure” and his first original concept, “libidinal materialism”. Throughout this exploration, what stands out the most is Land’s relentless criticism of Kantian philosophy and his efforts to construct an alternative to the post-Kantian tradition in continental philosophy.

Keywords: Nick Land, Georges Bataille, base matter, expenditure, transcendental idealism, death drive, libidinal materialism

Explication of Screen Culture: History of Formation and Forms of Cultural Constitution

Dmitry A. BELYAEV, Ksenia A. AKSENOVA

The screen is rapidly becoming the dominant mode of modern culture, acting as a technological tool, a medium and a special, in its own way unique environment for the multidimensional human existence. This actualizes the study of the genesis of screen culture, the content and evolution of the formats of its representation both in the structure of human everyday life and in the historical continuum of culture.
The research methods include the following: the methodology of evolutionism, cultural-semiotic and comparative methods, which allows to trace the genesis of screenness and compare various forms of screen culture; and the typological method and systematic approach, which allowed to systematize the forms of screen culture and reveal the principles of their distinction.
The paper identifies four main screen formats: cinematographic, television, computer and smartphone-mobile. The acceleration of the screening dynamics of many cultural spheres and the formation of a special cultural continuum will be revealed, where all traditional social and personal activities are screened, creating a space of new authenticity and mythology. The framework of its architectonics is visually dynamic forms, often with interactive and hypertextual properties. At the same time, screen rhetoric is based more on visual images and clip-editing techniques for presenting information, which leads to an emphasis on emotional-affective rather than rational-logical perception.
The authors concluded that many sociocultural practices are transferred to the screen format, contributing to the formation of a new dominant modality of human existence as a screen Homo Digital. The explication of the genesis of electronic screenness allows us to understand the structure of the screen reality of modern culture and build effective strategies for predicting its dynamics in the future.

Keywords: screen culture, cinema, television, computer, smartphone, interactivity, screen medium, digital man

“See you in the next life”—playing with time in sci-fi movies: Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow, Tenet

Horaţiu CURUŢIU and Ion INDOLEAN

In the logic of computer-generated worlds, this article proposes a look at films in which the protagonists try to overcome a tribulation or challenge by systematically returning to the past, moving not only in space but also in time. This can be seen as unreliable narration, as the viewer cannot predict what will happen next, since the scripts of these films work in a logic of their own, defying the dynamics of a classic narrative. Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011), Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), and Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020) present stories that rely on this medium’s ability to play with space and time for their very appeal, being similar in many ways to video games. To better understand all mental processes spectators undergo while watching this kind of stories, we look at how they use narrative conventions to create the feeling of a video game where space and time can be collapsed into one, and where boundaries are pushed for greater freedom. At the same time, within just a decade (2010s), we can identify an important evolution of this type of cinema, which automatically entails a development of the degree of narrative complexity and of its own rules that audiences are able to grasp. Source Code repeats a short period—8 minutes; Edge of Tomorrow spans several hours—about a day; and Tenet wanders through several days, back and forth, denying the protagonist a chance to repeat an event if he is killed, but giving him the opportunity to return in the midst of defining moments for the success of his mission.

Keywords: Sci-fi cinema, unreliable narration, time travel, video game logic

Integrating Generative AI in the UX Design Process: An Empirical Perspective

Evangelos NIFORATOS, Bruce FERWERDA, Mira POP, Max SCHRICKER

With just a few words, designers can invoke text-to-image AI tools to generate relevant images that jump-start the creative process. These images are computationally generated to approximate everyday-life physical or digital products, such as a coffee machine or a sports website, and thus can aid collaborative design. But how do generative AI tools influence the User Experience (UX) design process, and do they improve product UX after all? This paper investigates the integration of generative AI in the UX design process in the context of mobile application design. We organized two distinct design workshops where eight designers in total (1) used no AI, or (2) the Midjourney AI tool, to design two high-fidelity mobile app prototypes. We evaluated both prototypes with 32 participants in a user study. Our results indicate that AI influences the UX design process in a differential way but it does not necessarily lead to superior UX quality.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, user experience, generative AI, AI design, digital products, mobile applications

Social Network, Performative Language, and Platonic Problems. About Creativity in the Virtual World

Laura T. ILEA

The article tackles the relationship between the way we represent ourselves in the social network and the old Platonic problem of representation, as it was highlighted in Mihnea Măruță’s book, Virtual Identity. Why and How are We Transformed by the Social Media, 2023. Drawing on the idea that the seduction of the social network comes from the illusion of centrality and power, the book equally reiterates the threat of freedom it involves. Pondering on arguments highlighted by Horea Poenar and Érik Bordeleau in a dialogue published in the volume Inflexiuni, 2022, as well as on the symbolic fault lines explored by writers such as Nancy Huston, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elena Ferrante, the article proves that the creative multilayers of natural languages, involving “untranslatable” resources for truth, care, and justice, should not be leveled down to the translational achievements of a powerful engine. Moreover, the “perforating language” invoked by Achille Mbembe, which is meant to create a “terrestrial community,” should be able to express the scale of infinite probabilities on which information is performed nowadays, in a more creative way.

Keywords: social network, virtual identity, Platonic theory of representation, translation, terrestrial community, information, natural languages, creativity

Imagination and the Abyss in the Middle Eastern Novel: Elias Khoury and The Embedded Memory of Silence in Global Networks

Călina PĂRĂU

The present paper aims to investigate world literature’s struggle for finding an imaginary way out of the hegemonic logic of neoliberal capitalism, the standardization of global narratives, and the commodification of local realities. We will delve into the cultural relation between imagination and collective memory in order to investigate how fictionalization negotiates the accessibility of the past, retaining or dismissing unassimilable memories and representations. The paper will draw on the compelling case of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, who worked with the fragments of the stories he gathered from a Palestinian refugee camp, during the 1948 Arab-Istraeli war, in two of his major novels, Bāb al-Shams (Gate of the Sun, 1998) and Awlād al-Ghītū—Ismī Ādam (Children of the Ghetto—My Name is Adam, 2016). What these novels have in common is a fascination with the role of narrative imagination/storytelling within the dynamics of fractured representational relations on the global stage. Thus, I seek to look into the ways in which transnational imagination integrates or translates historical disruption or experiences of displacement. I am interested in the mechanisms employed by these works of fiction that shed light on how the ‘local’ becomes comprehensible through universalizing frames or on how the local functions as a spectre within this trans-cultural imaginary. The general aim is to see whether these contexts in which our relation to the story of the victim is constructed through the prevalence of imagination over memory discourses or historical narratives can foster a sense of international solidarity.

Keywords: imagination, world-system, displacement, translation, narrative, silence, history, fiction

From Bots to Beings: Posthuman Immortality in HBO’s Westworld

Amit MANDAL

The narrative dynamics of HBO’s Westworld pivots around the question of biological embodiment
and the hard problems of consciousness. Death does not only mean the end of body but also consciousness itself. But the link between brain/mind and its generative aspects for consciousness is breached in strictly representing consciousness via codes or algorithms—programmable and replicable, that may not always emanate from the dynamics of the brain/mind itself. Consciousness can be replicated into codes to create more human-like Hosts. This leads to the possibility of copy-pasting human consciousness in human-like robots to create a temporal continuity of human species defying death and mortality. Here, Westworld exercises transhumanist thinking about human existence and mortality by challenging our evolutionary programming and directives. It also includes robot ethics and theory of consciousness as main issues.
The paper investigates transhumanist imaginings regarding post-death experiences and its impacts upon theories of transcendence and immortality via Westworld. The very fact of re-presenting post-death experiences is bound to be a subjective perspective, thereby challenging objective methods of critically analysing such supposed ‘phenomenology’ or quantifying the same. The paper shall attempt to problematize the teleological stance of human embodiment in Westworld in favour of imagining a transcendental-embodied self by applying a transhumanist way of thinking.

Keywords: telos, transhumanism, consciousness, embodiment, immortality

November in Japan. Proper Ways of Being There

Horea POENAR

The following paper analyzes the ways in which imagination is a key mechanism in defining the concept of identity (of a persona or of the other). It does so by articulating two concrete experiences of Europeans visiting Japan: the literary theorist Roland Barthes in 1966 and the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in 1976. Both cases are relevant and symptomatic not only for those historical periods, but also for essential contemporary debates concerning cultural appropriation, multiculturalism and the perspectives through which we encounter, comprehend, and behave towards alterity. Several more theoretical dimensions are revisited, from Martin Heidegger’s rooting of the sense of Being in a precise here and now to ethical considerations on what constitues an Event (and not only an aesthetic one) and to the way music can teach us different nuances for redefining contemporary theory in connection to today’s most urgent needs.

Keywords: imagination, alterity, identity, music, ethics, axonometry

AI and the Problem of Communication: Language, codification, translation, adaptation

Ruxandra CESEREANU

This essay speculates on the nuances of communication between the human being and artificial intelligences or artificial intercommunication, trying to show what are the chances, problematizations or adaptations that the future will challenge us, as a human species engaged in the progress of extreme technology. In this sense, various research laboratories are presented, which have the visionary ambition to propose a positive solution in the relationship between man and Machines.

Keywords: posthumanism, artificial intelligence, communication, fake people, Machines, Lingodroids, Star Wars, Westworld, Merlin Project, CETI Project, physical intelligence, liquid networks

33e0

Ecological Emergencies Across Media

by IssuesJournal
Vol. 33, Issue 1 / 2025
Topic: Ecological Emergencies Across Media
Coordinators: Heidi HART, Ola STÅHL and Jørgen BRUHN

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Mediations of the climate-ecological emergency

Heidi HART and Jørgen BRUHN

Irony and Catastrophe: The Environmental Crisis in Jan Svěrák’s Oil Gobbler

Petr BUBENÍČEK

This case study examines Jan Svěrák’s student film Ropáci (Oil Gobblers, 1988), highlighting the environmental destruction in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. Though initially low profile, Svěrák’s mockumentary eventually became a significant symbol of the Czech environmental movement, maintaining its influence even after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of Communism. This study situates Oil Gobblers within its environmental and cultural context, analysing how it reflected, critiqued, and shaped the ecological consciousness. The paper aims to explore the film’s environmental themes, challenge anthropocentric assumptions, and link cultural production to broader ecological and cultural discourses. The study addresses two primary areas: first, broader environmental-cultural history, which, following Donald Worster, can be understood as the study of interactions between human societies and the nonhuman world (Worster 4). It will briefly overview the ecological devastation in northeastern Bohemia, the setting for Oil Gobblers. This analysis examines the creation and enduring significance of the mockumentary through the framework of intermedial ecocriticism, as developed by Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose (Inspired by but diverging in several ways from Bruhn and Salmose’s approach, Intermedial Ecocriticism is a new MA-level course, taught for the first time at Masaryk University by Petr Bubeníček and Tereza Dědinová in spring semester 2025. It explores the role of culture in the climate crisis, focusing on environmental justice, the green transition, and future visions of the biosphere. Through literature, film, visual arts, and new media, students examine how cultural forms shape ecological awareness. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on ecocriticism, cognitive science, environmental psychology, and discourse analysis. Special emphasis is placed on the role of individuals in promoting sustainability and critically engaging with media and misinformation). This theoretical approach explores how different media forms represent and communicate ecological issues across diverse contexts. The selected mockumentary employs satire as a central strategy to critique environmental degradation. By integrating various media elements—such as humorous dialogue, parodic imagery, and mock-serious narration—the film constructs a layered engagement with ecological themes. Transmediation plays a crucial role in this process: the mockumentary adapts and reinterprets real-world environmental concerns, particularly the total destruction of natural ecosystems, into a satirical narrative form. We analyse how this adaptation reframes serious subject matter to provoke reflection through irony. As a cinematic text, Oil Gobblers exemplifies the intermedial relationship between film and ecological discourse. Through its distinctive audiovisual and narrative techniques, it highlights environmental destruction while situating it within broader cultural and ecological debates, thus challenging conventional representations of environmental crises.

Keywords: Mockumentary, environmental destruction, Intermedial Ecocriticism, satire, transmediation, Czech Environmental Movement

Reflections of/on nature in late socialist Romanian press and amateur film production: absorption, marginalization, experimentation

Liri CHAPELAN

The present article has two main aims: on the one hand it intends to chart the emergence and the installation of an official ecological discourse in late socialist Romania – a discourse that is representative both for the growing wave of environmental concern that propagated across the Eastern Bloc and for the discursive strategies the socialist nations adopted in order to disculpate their civilizational stances and create an appropriate ideological frame for environmental preservation measures. After studying messages vehiculated principally through official press organs and defining the general cultural atmosphere that surrounded the fledgling national ecological consciousness, it will be argued that the production of the numerous amateur film clubs in activity in late socialist Romania offers an original vantage point to the issue of the type of imagery that was developed to echo the state-sanctioned ecological discourse. This will converge with the second aim of this article, which is to push amateur production into the sphere of interest of ecocritical media studies, while advocating for the necessity to adapt its methodologies to a type of material that is often poorly preserved, deprived of contextual information or even of parts of its content, and thus sometimes radically opaque. After focusing on a corpus of film club productions considered relevant for broad issues relating to representational paradigms of nature in the socialist context, the article will also scrutinize the early creations of materialist experimental film collective Kinema Ikon.

Keywords: late socialism, state-controlled ecological discourse, amateur film production, materialist experimental cinema

The Ecstatic Truth of the Lyric Essay: About a Mountain and the Skewed Path towards Ecological Agency

Stefano BRACCI TESTASECCA

This article aims to analyse the narrativization of scientific truth claims and journalistic reports in the realm of non-fiction through an intermedial analysis of About a Mountain (2010) by John d’Agata, a text described by its author as a “lyric essay.” Loosely centered around the allocation of radioactive deposits inside of Yucca Mountain, not far from Las Vegas, but braided with numerous other stories, About a Mountain creatively strays away from the generic constraints of journalism through what this article identifies as the use of ‘ecstatic truth’ in order to create a ‘skewed path’ towards ecological agency. The lyric essay’s transmediation of factual and scientific truth claims into a more informal and literary medium for a wider public is also identifiable in The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), a companion book co-authored with d’Agata’s fact checker, Jim Fingal. Lifespan, an alleged record of their seven-years long conversation regarding the authenticity of the depiction of the facts dramatized in what would become About a Mountain, sheds light on d’Agata’s methods and biases and on the negotiations between the scientific discourse of journalism and the poetic discourse of creative nonfiction. An intermedial methodology, informed by narratology, genre studies, and ecocriticism, is used to identify the generic traits of the lyric essay as media affordances, paying particular attention to its use of truth claims and fictionality. Overall, this article seeks to identify the medium specificity of the lyric essay as a unique genre blending fiction and nonfiction, and hence its unique approach to environmental issues and ecological emergencies.

Keywords: Lyric essay, Eecstatic truth, intermedial Analysis, creative nonfiction, ecological agency, truth claims

“Let the Camera Be a Weapon”: On Word and Image in Environmental Communication by Swedish Nature Photographer

Cecilia STRANDROTH

This article examines the interplay of word and image in environmental communication through the lens of Swedish nature photography, focusing on the exhibition Vinnare och förlorare i svensk natur
(Winners and Losers in Swedish Nature) by the Swedish Association for Nature Photographers. The study contrasts this contemporary exhibition with Arne Schmitz’s 1977 photographic essay Landskap i förvandling (Landscapes in Transformation), highlighting divergent strategies in combining visual and textual elements to convey environmental messages. Drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell’s theories of image-text relations, the article critiques the exhibition’s reliance on aesthetically captivating close-ups of individual animals, which, while emotionally engaging, risk undermining the intended message about biodiversity and ecological interdependence. The accompanying texts, though informative, are often relegated to a secondary role, creating a dissonance between visual and verbal narratives. In contrast, Schmitz’s work exemplifies a more integrated and pedagogically effective approach, where images and texts mutually reinforce a critical environmental perspective. The article argues for a reconsideration of the conventional division of labor between image and word in environmental media, advocating for more cohesive strategies that align aesthetic appeal with ecological urgency.

Keywords: Environmental communication, nature photography, image-text relationship, biodiversity, visual rhetoric, documentary photography, media aesthetics

Empowering Archetypes: Middle-Aged ‘Eco-Warrior’ Women in Small National Ecocinematic Landscapes

Andrea VIRGINÁS

A three-section argumentation is advanced in order to unravel the functioning of the female eco-warrior stereotype in (Eastern) European, mostly small national cinematic creations working with/in the genre of eco-cinema. The aim is to prove its pertinence in mediating not only climate emergency, but also in reacting to challenges posed by the greying ageing of Europe – specifically that of women –, while circumscribing a position that is relatable to both what Sandra Harding describes as “feminist standpoint theory” (2004) and Martin Müller as “Global East” (2020). Infertility – be it articulated explicitly as a consequence of the female ageing process, or as instances of mysterious childlessness, of tragic miscarriage, of artificial fertilization or of adoption of even non-human beings – is the marker of the female heroines with a penchant for fighting bigger or smaller ecological wars in the examined 21 century feature films. According to their positioning in time these protagonists are entering middle age, or have passed to the second, non-reproductive part of the female life trajectory, and their complex, above-described linkages to actual, hypothetical, imaginary or symbolical offsprings constitute a powerful method by which to represent female existence modulated by the ageing process.

Keywords: Environmental communication, nature photography, image-text relationship, biodiversity, visual rhetoric, documentary photography, media aesthetics

Feral Ecologies and the Toxic Sublime: Intermedial Narratives of Contamination in Fever Dream

Ajeesh A K and Rajesh HALAVATH

Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate, 2014, trans. 2017) presents a harrowing vision of ecological crisis through a deeply interior, disorienting, and sensorially immersive narrative. Avoiding the grand spectacle of climate catastrophe or the distanced realism of traditional environmental fiction, Schweblin instead offers a claustrophobic, affect-laden portrayal of slow violence, contamination, and maternal anxiety. Through its fragmented structure, second-person address, and atmosphere of dread, the novel transforms ecological emergency into a psychic and corporeal event, an embodied aesthetic experience that gestures toward intermediality. Drawing on the tonal registers of horror cinema, speculative fiction, sound art, and oral storytelling, Fever Dream unfolds as a toxic dreamscape where the boundaries between self and environment, human and nonhuman, become porous and unstable.
This paper positions Fever Dream as a work of intermedial ecological fiction, with its 2021 Netflix adaptation by Claudia Llosa functioning not merely as a narrative transposition but as an intermedial intensification of the novel’s eco-horror poetics. As such, the adaptation reveals what the novel can only suggest: the aesthetic entanglement of horror and ecology, dread and beauty. Both the novel and the film foreground feral ecologies, landscapes and bodies destabilized by agrochemical exposure, rendered ungovernable and mutagenic. These are not distant disasters, but intimate emergencies experienced through children, mothers, animals, and contaminated water. The Argentine countryside in Fever Dream is not a passive setting but an agent of mutation, producing hybrid life forms and altered perceptions. This paper argues that Fever Dream, in both its literary and cinematic expressions, radically reimagines environmental crisis as an aesthetic and affective entanglement. It refuses the redemptive arcs and explanatory frameworks typical of climate fiction and instead inhabits the terrain of spectral uncertainty, perceptual breakdown, and toxic intimacy. Environmental emergencies here are not narrated through spectacle but whispered in hallucinated fragments, buried in soil and breath, seeping slowly into the body and the screen alike.

Keywords: Environmental toxicity, Ecological trauma, Slow violence, Contamination, Narrative fragmentation, Ecological grief

Eco-Ekphrasis in Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Bewilderment

Silvia KURR

If in antiquity the term ekphrasis was used to denote a speech that stimulates mental visualization,
then in contemporary discourse, ekphrasis refers to a wide array of intermedial phenomena, from descriptions of paintings and sculpture to the integration of film, photography, and digital media in literary works. Evolving in a time of environmental emergencies, contemporary ekphrastic writing often engages with various media products that address the environmental crisis, such as ecological artworks, television footage of environmental disasters as well as painterly, photographic, and digital images of the Anthropocene. As Gabriele Rippl observes, ekphrasis can invite the reader to engage with ecological issues and “conceive of the human-nature relationship in a new non-anthropocentric way” (“Sustainability” 221). Rippl then introduces the term “eco-ekphrasis,” thereby bringing together considerations of intermediality and ecology in literature (“Sustainability” 225). My approach to eco-ekphrasis is informed by new materialist thought, which
aims to challenge the anthropocentric idea of human mastery over the material world. Taking as case studies Richard Powers’s novels The Overstory (2018) and Bewilderment (2021), this essay explores how eco-ekphrasis can draw attention to large-scale ecological processes and the effects of the Anthropocene, while simultaneously cultivating a sense of embodied, material embeddedness in the more-than-human world.

Keywords: ekphrasis, intermediality, new materialisms, arboreal time, Anthropocene, Richard Powers

“Mankind is not vicious, mankind is stupid”: Imprinting ecological sympathies in children in Samson and Sally

Signe KJÆR JENSEN

“Mankind is not vicious, mankind is stupid. Someday man will realize what he’s doing. By killing everything in the sea he is killing himself. When the sea is dead, mankind will die, too” (Hastrup, Samson and Sally, 55.30–55.45). These words, spoken by the old whale Moby Dick in the Danish animated film Samson and Sally from 1984, echo the ecological lament found in Bent Haller’s source novel, Kaskelotternes sang [The Song of the Sperm Whales, my translation]. In the novel, Moby Dick contrasts humanity’s inclination to “destroy and kill and be lonely” with the whales’ choice to “live well and happy together, play and sing” (Haller, 97, my translation). Both the film and the novel convey a powerful ecocritical message, subverting the anthropocentric perspective of Moby Dick and fostering sympathy for the hunted whales. In their depiction of multiple human-made and systemic threats towards “everything in the sea”, the two media products effectively pre-empts the idea of a global ecological emergency, warning against the mass extinction of species and the loss of vital ecosystems.
In this essay, I will examine how the film and the novel represent this looming ecological emergency and construct an eco-centric worldview through two interrelated strands. First, I will demonstrate how these different media products guide audience sympathies towards non-human subjects, which can be argued to be a key aspect in learning to recognize, acknowledge and act upon ecological emergencies. Second, I will investigate the role of intermedial references. In addition to references to the classic novel Moby Dick, or, the Whale (Melville), the film even alludes to Noah’s Ark, the sinking of the Titanic, and the dumping of radioactive waste. These kinds of references work to underscore humanity’s vulnerability and their impact on, and responsibility towards, the natural environment, highlighting the relevance of an intermedial framework in understanding the communication and mediation of ecological issues.

Keywords: transmediation, animation, children, ecocriticism, ecological emergency

The Dark Side of Ecomedia: Dystopian Imagination of the Sustainable Development Goals in Swedish Doom Metal

Andreas JAHREHORN ÖNNERFORS and Annette MARS

Ecomedia studies often align with ecocritical activism, portraying environmental themes and advocating for climate justice. However, this chapter investigates a contrasting phenomenon: the emergence of a ‘dark side’ of ecomedia – cultural expressions that obstruct climate action through denial, delay, and inaction. The study explores how ecomedia can be mobilized for uncivil ends, challenging normative assumptions about civil society’s role in promoting sustainability. It focuses on the Swedish doom metal band Wardenclyffe and its frontman Jacob Nordangård, whose work reimagines the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as instruments of global control. Drawing on civil society theory and transmedia storytelling, the chapter conducts a deep intermedial and transmedial analysis of the song and music video Georgia Guidestones/Evilution (2021). This includes decoding lyrics, musical composition, visual aesthetics, and narrative strategies. The analysis reveals a coherent conspiratorial narrative that inverts the SDGs into symbols of oppression. Through a synthesis of sound, text, and image, Wardenclyffe constructs a dystopian vision in which climate change is portrayed as a fabricated threat and sustainability as a tool for authoritarian control. The study suggests that conspiracy-driven ecomedia can generate what we term ‘conspiratorial affect,’ using artistic expression to foster distrust in climate initiatives. While the analysis is limited to a single case study, it opens avenues for examining similar patterns in other cultural artifacts. This chapter contributes to the emerging discourse on cultural climate obstruction, urging future research to further investigate how artistic media may serve not only as tools for ecological advocacy but also as platforms for resistance to and obstruction of environmental action.

Keywords: dark ecomedia, conspiratorial affect, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), doom metal, conspiracy theories

A Space for Grief: The Climate Artivism of the Red Rebel Brigade

Hans T. STERNUDD

This article examines performances by the climate artivist group Red Rebel Brigade, who appear at climate change demonstrations in full-body red costumes and perform in silence and slow motion. The performances aim to “embody the grief of the Earth” by creating an emotional space. Apart from analysing the Red Rebels’ performances, this article also discusses whether the concept of grief is useful in climate mobilisations. The Red Rebel Brigade is seen as a manifestation of post-apocalyptic environmentalism — an activism that acknowledges that the climate catastrophe has already occurred. The article examines this concept using an intermedial framework and a space-place theory. Space is understood as a category that is created relationally between people and places, as well as between people. Content analysis was used to analyse material consisting of YouTube videos of manifestations relating to COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 and A Funeral for Nature in Bath in 2024. The analysis yielded four types of relational spaces through the Red Rebel’s relationships with the environment, other people, the mass media, and other media. The results showed that, during the COP26 performance, the Red Rebels focused strongly on creating striking images for mass media. However, it seemed that they did not engage with or make sense to bystanders. By contrast, the use of a funeral theme in the Bath action seemed more intelligible to those not involved in the performance, making it easier for them to engage with it. Lastly, the question of whether grief can be fruitful in climate activism is addressed. One problem with grief is that, if it is fruitful, it leads to acceptance rather than action, Consequently, mobilisations focused on climate change may be better served by emotions such as fear, panic and anger.

Keywords: Grief, artivism, climate activism, post-apocalyptic environmentalism, Red Rebel Brigade, intermediality, space

Adventura Botanica: Dance as a Medium for Ecological Care

Heidi HART

This curatorial essay describes Odd Johan Fritzøe’s multimodal dance work Adventura Botanica, performed by Elisabeth Christine Holth at the 2023 Environmental Emergencies Across Media conference in Kalmar, Sweden. Using dance, sculpture, movement-activated lighting design, and improvisation-based music by the SPUNK group, this work mediates ecological themes in complex and yet approachable and even sometimes humorous ways. Though initially inspired by Darwin’s interest in multispecies pollination, Adventura Botanica offers numerous imaginative entry points for the audience. The process of preparing the space and the sculpture, the performance itself, and the energetic, curious responses of the audience created a nexus of embodied engagement with the conference’s theme. This chapter describes both the production’s overlapping intermedial layers and the phenomenon of critical vulnerability in reception, drawing on Lars Elleström’s intermedial theory and recent posthumanist approaches including Christine Daigle’s. A human body enacting nonhuman life processes does not necessarily come across as glib anthropocentrism but rather opens up a space for imagining other bodies and vulnerabilities on a threatened planet.

Keywords: dance, intermediality, curatorial practice, environmental art

Multimodal Layers of Environmental Racism in Confinada, a Brazilian Webcomic

Miriam de PAIVA VIEIRA

The present study engages with the pressing environmental crisis by examining how Confinada (2020–2021), a Brazilian webcomic, contributes to critical ecocriticism, particularly through multimodal and intermedial strategies. As environmental degradation disproportionately affects marginalized populations in Brazil, particularly in non-planned urban spaces like favelas, the concept of environmental racism (Chavis) becomes essential for understanding these asymmetries. The aim of this paper is to investigate how architectural and urban elements diagrammatically represented in the narrative multimodal layers of Confinada evoke traces of Brazil’s colonial past while exposing the structural inequalities that persist in contemporary urban policies. Methodologically, the study draws from intermedial ecocriticism and (multi)modality studies (Elleström; Bruhn; Gibbons; Jensen), combining them with theoretical frameworks from environmental racism (Chavis). The analysis focuses on selected panels of the comic that emphasize spatial segregation, environmental vulnerability, and everyday resistance.
Findings suggest that Confinada constructs a critical visual narrative that challenges representations of urban modernity and exposes how environmental precarity is racialized. The use of intermedial layers—visual, textual, spatial—becomes a powerful means of articulating socio-environmental critique from a marginalized perspective. While this study offers insights into a specific Brazilian context, its scope is limited by the focus on a single case study. Nevertheless, it opens pathways for further research on the role of graphic narratives and digital media in shaping decolonial ecocritical discourse.

Keywords: environmental racism; intermediality; multimodality; architecture; Confinada

The Teenage Climate Hero: Displacement of Responsibility in the Climate Fiction Series Ragnarok (2020–2024)

Maxime GEERVLIET

This paper examines the Netflix series Ragnarok (2020–2024) through the lens of intermedial ecocriticism, focusing on the construction and implications of the “Teenage Climate Hero” trope. Drawing on Linda Haverty Rugg’s theory of environmental guilt displacement and the intermedial framework of Niklas Salmose and Jørgen Bruhn, the study argues that Ragnarok displaces the responsibility for addressing the climate crisis onto adolescents, despite clearly identifying corporate and governmental actors as the primary culprits. By transmediating real-world ecological emergencies and youth climate activism—particularly as represented in the documentary Make the World Greta Again—into a mythological YA superhero narrative, the series both empowers and burdens its young protagonists. The paper explores how the series’ narrative and visual strategies, including the use of Norse mythology and superhero tropes, obscure this displacement by framing environmental resistance as a heroic, individualistic quest. Ultimately, the series undermines its ecological message by concluding with a metafictional twist that renders the entire climate battle imaginary, thereby neutralizing the agency of its young heroes and reinforcing the problematic rhetoric that future generations alone must solve the climate crisis.

Keywords: Teenage Climate Hero, displacement of responsibility, Intermedial Ecocriticism, Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi), youth activism, transmediation, environmental guilt

Spheres of the Aquatocene: Homo Aquaticus Resurfacing Submerged Histories

Adela NEGUSTOR

This paper explores how J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is reimagined through intermedial ecocriticism and McKenzie Wark’s concept of low theory in the context of the Toronto Biennial of Art’s Cinesphere. Curated by Charles Stankievech, the exhibition brought together 24 artists whose works reinterpreted Ballard’s speculative vision through film, digital simulation, sonic composition, and archival media. Works such as Stankievech’s Cargo Coral (Espiritu Santo), Lisa Rave’s Europium, Drexciya’s Bubble Metropolis (1993), Cyprien Gaillard’s Ocean II Ocean, and Brandon Poole’s Carla’s Island investigate climate crisis, colonial residue, and techno-scientific mediation. By analyzing how these intermedial works engage audiences through layered media forms, this paper argues that such practices are not simply aesthetic but also tactical. They destabilize hegemonic narratives of progress and environmental catastrophe, functioning as “low theory” interventions that foreground submerged histories, critique techno-scientific rationalities, and propose speculative futures. Drawing from Afrofuturism, media archaeology, and the sensory politics of sound and space, these artworks reveal the climate crisis as both material and mediated. Intermedial strategies—archival remix, sonic myth-making, and cinematic temporal collapse—serve as tools to subvert dominant epistemologies and reconfigure the relationships between ecology, history, and media. These adaptations do not merely visualize ecological transformation; they embody and spatialize it, engaging audiences in affective, multisensory ways. As artificial islands and aquatic architectures become speculative spaces for negotiating climate anxiety and terrestrial precarity, intermedial art emerges as a critical method of reworlding. Ultimately, this paper contends that media are not only vehicles of representation but also historical agents. Through the lens of Ballard’s drowned landscapes, these artists articulate new relations between past and future, memory and matter—where intermediality becomes a necessary practice for navigating ecological uncertainty and reshaping planetary imaginaries.

Keywords: low-theory, homo aquaticus, aquatocene, dome, Afrofuturism

Drowned Futures and Ecological Reflections: Mediations of a Disanthropic Earth in Manifest Destiny and The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human

Kricie Ann JONSSON

This essay presents an intermedial ecocritical analysis of the mural Manifest Destiny and the metroidvania video game The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human. It examines these two distinct media products as disanthropic narratives by comparing how they mediate the themes of human extinction and nature’s reclamation. The study also considers the kinds of ecological reflections these works may elicit from their audience and the means by which they do so. The analysis reveals how the mediation is facilitated and shaped by each medium’s specific affordances and genre conventions. Furthermore, the study uncovers similarities in affective tone and reflective impact, contributing to both the discussion of ecomedia and ecological agency, and the theorization of disanthropy as a distinctive narrative mode within the broader landscape of eco-speculative storytelling.

Keywords: disanthropy, disanthropic narratives, climate change, intermedial ecocriticism, submergence, mural, metroidvania, Manifest Destiny, The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human

Submerged Surroundings: The Use of Maps in Contemporary Flood Fiction

Malin LÖF NYQVIST

Flooding is a major factor in current and future environmental emergencies caused by anthropogenic climate change—for example in the form of rising sea levels or extreme weather events. The flood is also one of the most culturally recognizable and relatable tropes through which climate change has been mediated in Western literature and film for the last half century (Trexler 2015). Flooding, real or fictional, exposes the ambivalence of humanity’s relationship with water, and serves as a reminder of the dynamic nature of our surrounding landscapes. Contemporary flood fiction, whether in the form of literature, film or TV, tends to depict and address questions of place, place attachment and change, which are highly relevant to understanding the emergencies facing the more-than-human world in the Anthropocene. In this article, I examine one specific aspect of this tendency: the function of the non-authorial, extradiegetic map in contemporary flood fiction.
Using a discussion about how to understand the inclusion of visual maps in literary fiction in relation to the concepts of paratext, imagetext and illustration as a point of departure, I examine the relationship between the visual map and literary narrative in two Swedish flood novels. I question what role these maps play in the mediation of environmental disasters or climate change, especially in relation to genre, the spatiality of the novels’ storyworlds, and the interplay between image and text, and suggest some further explorations on this topic where interdisciplinary efforts combining intermedial and literary studies might be especially fruitful.

Keywords: flood fiction, climate change fiction, disaster fiction, fictional maps, literary maps, paratext, imagetext