So the way I structured the essay was I first of all broke down the theory of the anthropocene of what it means, and then I talked about each of the pieces of media I was analysing and linked them to how they represent the anthropocene, then gave an overall conclusion / critique of them.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.0006

Bethune Potash Mine, Saskatchewan

https://universes.art/en/magazine/articles/2017/forest-law

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html

https://www.theclimatecoalition.org/cop26

View at Medium.com

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4646&context=edissertations

Against the Anthropocene

I decided on the essay question In his book Against the Anthropocene, T. J. Demos critically surveys the visual culture of popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, Eco-activist mobilisations, and experimental artistic projects that represent climate change. With reference to Demos’ critique, examples of visual media that represent climate change and ideas of the Anthropocene in terms of the ideological definition of our relationship with nature.

I chose this question because of how I enjoyed the very last teaching lecture based on the Anthropocene. I was interested on the perspective of how nature is applied in the media and how it is been discussed. It is something I am passionate about. I find nature truly fascinating and thought I could discuss controversial issues going on in this current time and apply it within this Essay. I had never heard of what this current epoch was called until this lecture. Therefore, I thought I could research and expand these ideas upon my essay.

I began my research by watching videos online about the anthropocene as well as different types of media and how they target climate change. I came across this coalition called the climate coalition and actually signed up as I found their advertising interesting and vert impactful. I thought it would be a great piece of evidence of a group supporting climate change in a positive way and so I decided to use this is in my essay.

ANTHROPOCENE – How nature is applied in the media/ Human impact on the environment/ ecology towards the media…..

Human impact – reasons for it 

Environment 

       Anthrpocene (what we have entered) – declared as a new epoch (era)

Defined as a geological time period, where humans have influenced altered (we are affecting the earth in every single way) eg depths of the ocean we would find things to trace back or 

Search welcome to the anthropocene – implied that we have this responsibility 

TJ Demos, 2017 – the idea of the anthropocene in a media way there is a military state and corporate which has started it to a degree 

Nature has always been a product of human kind – production of nature  smith N 1984 

Its there for our use 

Progress or increase of capital accumulation and the expansion of economical development, thus material substratum ism ore and more the product of social production and the dominant axes between man and nature 

Humanities relationship with nature 

• ideas mainly come from the romantic image 
• Wanderer above the sea and fog, Freidrich – implicates the idea of the beautiful and the sublime, asthetics where the relationship between the humans and the grand or Terrifying aspects of nature 
• a image of Beauty (which is passive)is a  pleasure experience 
• Sublime – is what has the power to destroy us  humans (nature)

Research Romanticism 

10 min 

Burke – the sublime has a casual structure that is unlike 

John Martin “Apocalypse” Tate 

Standing on the idea of the sublime, echoed in cm through disaster movies 

Hobbesian Nature – Research 

Goyas, fight with cudgels, a Hobbesian sense of nature, dragging them into nature 

Without a social contract a hierarchy or social order society breaks down into a state of natural carnal law/ savagely 

Conflicting Concepts of Nature: Rousseauian Nature more balanced 

Rousseaus  1754

 theory of the natural human: the laws are corrupting humans, earth does not belong to us 

Thomas Gaimsborough 

What is the relationship between man and nature – it is a possession and the couple have power over it, nature is perceived as order and controlled 

How does this new epoch of Anthropocence relate to image technologies 

– 

How does the Anthropocene enter into visuality, and what are its politics of representations ?

• demos 
• Visual representation of data 

World of matter – international art and media project – presents a website with content of critical climate change and presents the epoch in a different way 

As humans we do have an determination of changing the way of the epoch 

• eg Ursular Biemann, Carbon Eacologies, forest law 2014 
• The connection is hidden and this artistic way shows how nature is attached/ linked to nature and if it is invisible not good ….
• Ikea room 

Potash mine 2017 

Saw mils Nigeria 2016 

Highlights things like population and also resources being taken 

Mississipi An Anthropocene river HKW

Gravesend Steve McQueen 2007 Colbalt thats in your mobile phone 

Drawing colonel references through slave trade also mining extracting – conga 

Dehumanised mo humans within this section of the film 

Juxtaposed with pictures from documentary footage from Africa, workers working in basic conditions have no rudimental tools, area not too picturesque 

Anhrpocene involves this extraction, and use of minerals, glosses over the ethical and moral connections, doing the opposite raising moral questions 

Making analogies between economy and the past 

Deadly parallel, for shock value 

Is a new future possible 

Social politics 

More of the visual world 

Look at examples of how it effects climate change 

Contrast it with academic sources 

Maybe thats where the is rhetoric is coming from 

Alternatives forms of visualisations 

How the visulaition on the world enables us to how it affects 

Humans and nature how its changed the current age 

Nature and evolution is tired 

Humans are opposed thumbs then didn’t nature evolve to destroy itself 

The only reason we can destroy things is because of hands and brains 

– ideology in the media 

Commodity Fetishism 

Fetish – defined as an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or had a spirit inside 

Freudian – use of the word fetishism defines a form of sexual desire is linked to an object. 

This is not how Marx defined fetishism but frauds definition does come into play later!

Object – commodity 

Exchange of commodity/ object is to obscure the hierarchy to transform your position within society – social status 

Karl marx on alienation –

19th century – workers only had their labour to sell

Capitalism alienation – factory workers cannot afford what they are making but are for the people who pay next to nothing for their income therefore the people from the commodity become alienated 

Fetish – the items they cant afford 

 The commodity embodies the relationship between the workers and the capitalism in his employment of the worker ….

Alienation the … 

Reinfication – is when abstract thing is rendered real or when the subjective is rendered objective 

Example 1. Car – presented with women – male sexual virility 

Its shiny looks nice – expensive – social status 

Example 2.Laptop – abstract notion having an apple is for creative and liberal thinking people – this idea is stuck with society 

Adam Curtis  Happy victim 2003 the photographers gallery of people who need these commodities that have the power to change and give him power – designer trainers 

Happiness machines – relationship from freud and his nephew Bernays 

Jump between necessities and want 

Socks with holes – replacing with designer ones 

Bernard – satisfying the masses with items they don’t even need – started mass consumer production for example adverts, employed psychologists to tell about specific products, but was acknowledged as just help, influenced ads for cars to sexualise men they are more attractive 

Use propaganda for war you can use it for peace  

Men had created a` taboo of women smoking in public 

Cigarettes mean to women – cigarettes resemble the male genitals and some want their own according to psychiatrist

Bernard – women smoking makes them more powerful which has still stuck today 

Irrational little objects/commodities that you think you need still have a way of making you feel power 

He connected the emotional need for objects and the power they gave 

Linked to the scary idea of over production for goods 

If visual culture is the continuous displacement/ appearance of meaning in the field of vision and the visible, how can visually culture reinforce the fetishism of the commodity 

Refresh on semiotics 

• myth, how signifiers – sounds and signifiers concepts are connected together by the process of signification 
• Bathes suggested that images are signs that convey a meaning beyond their intent use 
• Image of a car it doesn’t convey just a car but abstract status such as masculinity and social status depending on the car 
• Conotating – has extra added value, shiny, women, big car, extra meaning – masculine sexuality 
• Chanel as a commodity – a smell, is the smell chance is it inherently sexy glamour, yes because is  constructed through metaphors, its creating fake news 

Fait accompli 

Debord,, guy, 1967 society of the spectacle 

Human relationships are no longer reinified 

Essana O’neil – her reveal of construct was a spectacle – bikini and breakfast 

• reflecting reality of life all that was once directly lived has become more mere representational 

Reason we take photos, the spec transforms human relation into objectifyed relations among images 

= alienation 

Not about living its about having 

Matrix – the system is what keeps the elites in the power making their position unassailable 

The film is so effective as we are blind to its operation we are so emerged we don’t realise how its to do with social control 

 The sum of all our actions dreams and ideas and interactions is the spectacle so we cannot easily conceive of alternateives 

By unconsciously alienating ourselves from ezchother and the world we are made into willing, complaint slaves to the capitalist system 

Notes from the lecture:

NARRATIVE THEROY 

• formative language 
• Narratives can be simple or complex, understanding 

Key people 

• Vladimir Propp 

Soviet formalist scholar 

Argued that whatever differences there might be in a story you can group together the character types that share 

Characters – prepell or change the drecti0on of the story 

• the villain – opposed hero
• The dispatcher – sends hero on quest 
• The helper – aids hero 
• The princess – héros reward/ object of vilans plot 
• Her father – acts to reward hero 
• The donor – provides magical object 
• The hero – seeks something 
• The flash hero – disrupts hero with fans claims 

American theorist – Joseph Cameron – most influential out of all narrative theorists 

• hero with a thousand faces 
• Hero myth circle 
• Influenced George Lucas very heavily and the starwars films can be seen as a practical embodiment of Camerons ideas particularly of the monomyth or hers journey 

How the old star wars includes more of narrative 

New didn’t work 

Tzvetan Todorov 

• Bulgarian philosopher – structuralist 

Simple fives step 

1. All is well equilbrium 
2. A disruption of that order by an event 
3. A recognition that disorder has occurred 
4. An attempt to repair the damage of disorder 
5. A return or restoration of new equilibrium 

Portagonist –

 Equilberiuum           disruption – quest – climax/ resolution – re equipserim 

Antagonist 

Fritzlang – terminator and the matrix 

Religion is a founding as stories – were people get ides from 

It is all down to our cultural appropriateions

Other binary oppositions 

• goo0d vs evil 
• Male vs female 
• Humanity vs tech 
• Nature vs industrakiastion 
• East vs west 
• Dark vs light 
• morally, dirt vs clean 
• Wild vs civilisation 

Binary upheld ? Or not 

What is the objective ?

We use binary app to understand the world. To use a common example 

The world ‘man’ in English means ‘not animal’ not woman and no boy 

How is poverty represented in the media 

• the depiction is often negatively 
• Uk 14.3 million ppl are in poverty 
• Gif a family hasn’t had education within 3 generations this could be seen as poverty – socially not narratively 

Seabrook, j 2016, cut out living without welfare, London; Pluto press 

Pervasive narratives in the media; ? 

• poverty – what function do the poor perform in society and how is the idea of poverty narrativised in the media as a perversive 

Nottingham slums doc 1969 

• negative, 

Creating this narrative that we should change and give up places that have centimetre and progress in society 

Poor people should not have luxuries 

They get defensive when questioned 

Power inbalance 

Narratives with poverty, are still the narratives we see just with some change 

Benefit street 

• 90% of the residents claimed benefits 
• Uses the same narratives 

How can/ are pervasive media narratives around migration challenged??

A moral critique – what we see in the media it looks real but its biased and subjective 

Further research after Lecture

Tutorial Brief – From this tutorial brief I have acknowledged that this visual essay/blog will act as a critical journey, which will follow my independent researching, learning and establish my conceptual development skills. As well as being a place which enables me to gather and reflect on my thoughts for my essay.