Critical Habitations: Ecopolitics for teh Lulz

[Photo: ‘Anonymous’] My text, ‘Ecopolitics for teh Lulz: Transmedia Civil Disobedience in the Age of Fossil-Fuelled Information Capitalism’, has been published in Critical Habitations as a contribution to its third debate, ‘Pluralising Practices.’ According to the editors Alexander Dunst, Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Gudrun Rath and Anja Schwarz: Cultural studies today fork distinct trajectories, thus making… Continue reading Critical Habitations: Ecopolitics for teh Lulz

Cyberactivism

In July 2015, I presented a working paper, ‘Choreography of Disobedience,’ at the recent Performance Studies international (PSi) conference, ‘Performance Climates,’ at the University of Melbourne. My paper expanded an earlier discussion of the Climate Games during COP21, Paris. Reviewing these events I was struck by the lack of ‘cyberactivism’ that occurred during the games.… Continue reading Cyberactivism

A future much worse than the present

[‘Klaus Emmerich in Brown Coal Blues’ (2016) Photo: Vice] Brown Coal Blues (2016) is a documentary produced by VICE INTL that concerns mining in the Rhineland region, in which reporter Filipa Von Stackelberg interviews employees of energy corporation RWE who operate the Garzweiler lignite mine, alongside locals and mining opponents. Early in the program Von… Continue reading A future much worse than the present

RealTime: ‘Art versus the war against Nature’

[Photo: Artúr van Balen / Tools for Action] My report from Paris COP21 for RealTime, re-titled as ‘Art versus the war against Nature’ is now online. I will keep the title it was filed with, ‘Choreography of disobedience,’ for an upcoming conference paper. The second week of COP21 was notable for the influx of activists from… Continue reading RealTime: ‘Art versus the war against Nature’

Fossil Free Culture

In December 2015 I was involved in an intervention undertaken by a group of artists and activists at the Louvre museum in Paris during the COP21 conference on climate change and also in the context of Climate Games. The event, ‘Big Oil Out of Culture’, was well publicised in the days before with the following… Continue reading Fossil Free Culture

The Paris Agreement

Prior to COP21 in Paris, December 2015, policy makers agreed that a suitable target for the UN summit was to keep global temperature rises caused by greenhouse gas emissions below 2 ˚C, a figure commensurate with a pre-industrial era (for a critique of this figure and the use of surface temperature as a catch-all indicator… Continue reading The Paris Agreement

The Shadow of the Future

The crisis of anthropogenic global warming presents an urgent problem requiring a rapid response and a re-prioritising of values. Planetary climate change is often discussed, notably by Naomi Klein, as an irreconcilable conflict between ‘extractivist’ capitalism and Earth systems that support life. Klein and a range of climate justice social movements are advocating that communities… Continue reading The Shadow of the Future