International symposium
media/environment
Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis
26+27 august 2026
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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 Griffioen, 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
The exact schedule and detailed panel timings will follow shortly. Follow this page to stay updated.
panel 1: analog
Elena Past
Wayne State University, Detroit
Fire and the Archive: Climate Change, the Mediterranean, and the Istituto LUCE
Michelle Henning
University of Liverpool
Photography’s Broken Contract: Environmental Relations and Technological Imaging
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
Anne-Katrin Weber
University of Lausanne
Entangled Flows: Automobility and Television in Postwar Switzerland
Salomé Lopes Coelho
Utrecht University
Ecologies of Extractive Violence Across Non-Fiction Film
Wu Chi-Yu
Media artist, Taipei
Does Celluloid Dream of Camphor Forests? Colonial Extraction and the Material Prehistory of the Moving Image
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
Interested? Register here.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Presentations will also be streamed online, but this is primarily an in-person event.