This week we began working on our Sensing Climates Major Project. We had the opportunity in class to reflect on our progress over the semester to assist us with our final media work.

On Friday, after selecting our groups, we discovered our compatible skillsets and common interest in making audiences uncomfortable in order to incite positive action for environmental purposes. In the image above, we analysed what it means to ‘sense’ and to be ecologically aware while producing media. From there, we brainstormed initial ideas for our project based upon eco-cinematic techniques we had both learnt about in class and integrated within previous experiments. We found that techniques such as extended shot durations, and emotive sound/imagery would pair well with our shared goal to confront audiences, according to the success of certain experiments from the course. For example, I cited the concepts from Experiment 1 and Experiment 5. For the first experiment, I learnt from the reading Attunements about the hidden, non-human narratives within natural environments (Carbonell, et al., 2021). Then, Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene was a reading that inspired all of us to reflect on the specific ways we can use media to disturb viewers and represent climate issues (Haraway, 2016). Similarly, Teah referred to the Feral Atlas from the week prior that had used jarring music and off putting imagery to force her to contemplate. Inspired by these ideas, we came up with one of our own (Tsing, et al., 2021). Based on the broad question: ‘What does climate change seem like from non-human perspectives?’, we will seek to create a short film from the perspective of an insect that experiences aspects of environmental damage, including noise pollution. We will use immersive cinematography and sound distortion to achieve this effect.

Carbonell, I., Tsing, A. L., & Tsai, Y. L. (2021, September 14). Attunements. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/attunements

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=4649739.

Tsing, A. L., Deger, J., Saxena, A. K., Zhou, F. (2021). Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Redwood City: Stanford University. http://doi.org/10.21627/2020fa