This studio has given me a lot of opportunities to reflect on what I believe it is to make good media, and more specifically, good climate media. While my opinions are still largely the same, I feel as though I have a better and more focused grasp on why they are the same. In my prompt 3 blog post on ‘what makes good and bad climate media’ I said that “‘Good’ climate media tends to present objective truths and factual evidence, navigating and understanding the viewer’s emotions and how to appeal to them in an appropriate manner”. This is a sentiment that I still agree with two and a half months later, and since then I have strived to achieve an intelligent navigation of truths and facts, to make media that “put[s] something on the agenda” (Hammond 2017, 2), and to appropriately and respectfully appeal to the emotions of whoever it is that may see my media.
The hyperobject I chose for my media artefact was e-waste; I chose this because I have an interest in technology but also because it was a subject that I didn’t have an extensive knowledge in. I wanted my media artefact to pay closer attention to the things that most people, including myself, don’t think about all that often, I wanted to ponder what happens to pieces of technology when people no longer have an interest or ‘need’ for them. The essence of a hyperobject is that they are “massively distributed entities that can be thought and computed, but not directly touched or seen” (Morton 2013, 37) and this is exceedingly accurate when thinking about e-waste. People generally have a tendency to think about the things they are surrounded by everyday, but by the nature of the way prominent western nations discard ‘obsolete’ pieces of technology, shipping them off to less wealthy countries to be dumped, people rarely have to think about the consequences of their unethical waste of technology. I wanted my media artefact to inspire some thought into the way we recycle our technologies that we use everyday.
My artefact addresses this issue by illustrating the ways in which technology is discarded, where it ends up, and how it affects the people that it comes to surround in foreign countries. I tried to address this , especially in the latter half of my artefact, by displaying the realities of the e-waste industry and the poor health it brings upon the people who harvest e-waste in order to survive.
The constraints I chose were ‘no use of music’, ‘no use of human voices or voiceover’ and ‘no media intended for corporate or commercial purposes’. The constraints posed a challenge to me quite a bit but I feel as though they helped me to hone my skills as a creator and to find creative ways to express what I wanted to say. Although I had created a soundscape for my artefact, after completing the editing I felt as though it would benefit from some music, however I decided against incorporating music instead choosing to further add to my soundscape to alleviate the feeling that something was missing. I am definitely glad I chose to do that.
In his academic paper ‘Deep Adaptation’ Jem Bendell says “the information on our climate predicament is so negative, the balance is often found in highlighting more positive information about progress on the sustainability agenda” (Bendell 2018, 4), and while I did not want my artefact to be ‘uplifting’ or ‘inspiring’, through my artefact’s confronting imagery, I did want it to perhaps spark an inner dialogue about how we as individuals should ethically dispose of our devices and how as a population we can and should be doing better.
Hammond, P 2017, ‘Introduction: ‘Post-political’ climate change‘ in Climate Change and Post-Political Communication: Media, Emotion, and Environmental Advocacy, Routledge, p2
Morton, T 2013, ‘Poisoned Ground: Art and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects’, Sylmpoke, vol. 21, no.1-2, p. 39.
Bendall, J 2018, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, accessed online: <https://jembendell.com/2019/05/15/deep-adaptation-versions/