Blazing oil rigs in Werner Herzog's film Lessons of Darkness.

A clip from the Werner Herzog film, Lessons of Darkness.

 

This website will explore themes in visual media and popular culture. It will ask questions in regards to how ideas, stories and myths effect our relationship with the natural world. How do themes in the media help shape our attitudes towards Nature?   To address this question, I have identified five themes:

1. Environmental Collapse as Spectacle: Disaster Entertainment

2. Invisibility of Nature: Remoteness in Space and Time

3. TINA - There Is No Alternative: Fatalism and the End of Ideology

4. Embeddedness in Nature: Ego vs Eco - centric Perspectives

5. Techno-fantasy: The Possibility of Transcending Natural Limits

This project aims to engage a community in collaborative decoding of themes in visual media.

In a media saturated world, developing an understanding how we are influenced by the media is an important skill. Decoding is a practice which involves deconstructing images and stories in the media to analyse underlying themes. Themes can be overt or hidden: our cultural stories affect us either way.

Our values will almost 'naturally' reflect the stories that are part of our cultural space unless we take a critical perceptive. Decoding involves thinking critically about the values embedded in the media and deciding for ourselves whether or not we accept these values.

By approaching media critically we can explore which themes reflect our own values and which themes might be corrosive to our well-being and the well-being of the planet.

Radical educator Paulo Friere developed the practice of decoding in the 1970 in Brazil. In this project decoding is used to develop an understanding of how the images that we are surrounded by affect our attitudes towards the natural world. Decoding is critical discourse analysis for everyday people.

Above: Vogue's 2010 Water and Oil photospread

Symbolic violence refers to the process through which ideas such as racism or sexism are reproduced through the media, education and other cultural practices. The concept was developed by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu. Power imbalances within a culture are maintained through symbolic violence, which perpetuates structural injustice.

Symbolic violence is a process where schemes of domination are embedded not only within the social order but within cognitive structures and even our feelings. It is because these ideas are so deeply embedded within policy, custom, language, taste and emotions that racism and sexism are so difficult to eradicate.

Due to the hard work of critical thinkers and social movements, we have made significant progress with both racism and sexism. The same critical strategies are of use for addressing our relationship to the natural world. .

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Patiently awaiting the rapture.