Film Practices for the Inclusion of the More than Human in the Representation of Cultural Landscapes

In the context of the Anthropocene, there has been a move to bring up to date the relationship between lens-based media and the world. Authors such as Juri Parikka and Sean Cubbit have offered geological and environmental accounts of media art. However, there has been a debt in lens-based media practice regarding the production of methods and aesthetic approaches that respond to the onto-epistemological challenges. Videographers and filmmakers have generally reduced the “real” world by using its image to articulate discourses or create abstract experiences, which are distant from the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world’s expressive capacity, reproducing the operative mode of the forces that are being criticized.
This project attempts to address the need for a lens-based media paradigm that considers the influences of the world’s expression as an agent in the representation of ecological relations. For this purpose, a space of contradiction is defined as a result of audio-visual mediation. In order to attain representations along-with, the project adapts and develops methods that detour interpretations of the world and the use of its images to build rhetorical figures or enhanced experiences. This study explores possible methods that consider the “silent speech” of things in spheres beyond the visual. It looks to determine the feasibility of incorporating and problematizing the world as an agent-driven process of meaning creation in the lens-based medium. The aim is to propose answers for one of the most haunting problems for lens-based media at a time when art practices are embracing geo-cultural convergences and eco-political engagement with the world.