The New Ecologies of Images: Ecomedia Ontology in the Capitalocene, Adrian Ivakhiv

The New Ecologies of Images: Ecomedia Ontology in the Capitalocene, Adrian Ivakhiv (Simon Fraser University, Dept. of Global Humanities)

We live in an image-rich world that is changing rapidly as a result of the innovations and phenomenological incursions of digital media. Drawing upon Félix Guattari’s “three ecologies” and the process-relational and semiotic ontologies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Sanders Peirce, this talk will present a process-semiotic framework for thinking of images in terms of three ecologies: the material, the perceptual, and the social. It will then apply this framework to understanding the transition from the pre-digital environment to one that is, in many respects, “post-indexical,” with digital image generation rendering images “liquid” and no longer traceable to their sources.

Digital media enable greater democratization of image production and consumption, but also extend the capacities for surveillance capitalism and neoliberal governmentalities. At the same time, global climate/ecological changes with their associated resource conflicts and migration emergencies pressurize polities toward populism, xenophobia, “securitization,” and conspiracy theory. Image users have increasingly become targets and vectors for new forms of information warfare, including those supported by rival neo-imperial powers in an increasingly multipolar world. How can ecomedia scholars and activists work, in this setting, toward a democratized public sphere, one in which equitable solutions to climate-related challenges could be developed and implemented?

Adrian Ivakhiv holds the J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Until 2024, he was Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture ad Steven Rubenstein Professor of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. His books include Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum Press, 2018), and the forthcoming The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2025). He is editor or co-editor of Media+Environment journal, The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies (2023), and a forthcoming anthology called Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

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