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These two videos are panels from Transmediale 2014 both looking at the ecological aspects of the accelerating production of electronics and some of the known consequences this has on our environment. The first one concentrates on plastic and the second one on the effects of electronic and synthetic waste.

transmediale 2014 afterglow — An Ecosystem of Excess
With Pinar Yoldas, Heather Davis, Jennifer Gabrys, Bernd Scherer, Daniela Silvestrin

At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Sat, 1.2.2014

Starting from Yoldas’ project An Ecosystem of Excess and her artistic approach through speculative design and biology, this panel will analyze and discuss the impact on what we call “nature” and the term’s ontological crisis. In her exhibition, plastics are the starting point for thinking a new speculative evolution. Plastics have radically changed our environment and the ecological footprint we are leaving on the planet, and in big part contributed to the ecological turn that we are experiencing as one symptom of the anthropocene. But plastic seems to even have become a natural force of its own, unstoppable, invading every space, eliminating and ousting bit by bit the life that had been inhabiting these spaces before. Do plastics have their own agenda? If so, what do we find if we study the ethology of plastics? If there are more and more parts of the ocean where we find numbers of plastic molecules and particles that are many times higher than those of plankton, what is left of “nature” – and the world – as we know it? The ubiquity of plastic, mostly in the form of trash, is creating a new kind of “nature”, and therefore “environment”, which we will use as a starting point to rethink the term and its meaning today, as well as the geopolitical and ethical thinking related to it. In an attempt to overcome old habits of thoughts we will reflect on possible ways of positioning ourselves in relation to other humans as well as nonhumans in these “next” or “post-natural” landscapes surrounding us. (Source:  Transmediale archive)

 

transmediale 2014 afterglow — The Media of the Earth: Geologies of Flesh and the Earth
With Ryan Bishop, Sean Cubitt, Jussi Parikka, Denisa Kera

At Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin
Sat, 1.2.2014

Afterglow of The Mediatic conference stream

The panel focuses on the effects of electronic and synthetic waste on geological and biological bodies. The tissue and the soil effectively register the residue of scientific and technological processes, acting as inadvertent storage site and archival apparatus for our trash. The panel includes discussions of electronic waste, nuclear fallout as well as the global labour concerning the geology of media: minerals and material sciences. It is in this sense that it aims to address the media of the earth, and the earth as essential to the existence of media: issues which tie organic bodies with the non-organic reality. The speakers represent media and technology studies perspectives to what was often reserved as a territory of the sciences, namely geophysics. A geopolitics that is truly geo-based emerges from these engagements. (Source: Transmediale Archive)