Leonardo Book Series. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. ix, 210 pp. (Illustrations.) US$37.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-262-03456-2.
Screen Ecologies presents an overview of artworks and screen-based media in the Asia-Pacific region that engage with the environment (referring here either to spatial concerns more broadly or more specific issues like climate change and pollution). The book is valuable mainly as a catalogue of specific art projects and events in the region fitting within this broad rubric. Beyond this, the book’s unrealized theoretical agenda and the continually shifting focus of its chapters turns Screen Ecologies into a head-scratching assemblage that is often less than the sum of its disparate parts.
The book begins by arguing an eco-critical focus on the Asia-Pacific is warranted because the region is a prime contributor to environmental pollution and e-waste. The first few chapters then introduce an ecology-minded, process-oriented materialism very popular in recent work in human geography, anthropology, and media ecologies. The early alignment with this ecological turn sets up some high expectations for the book as a whole, promising a new perspective on art and digital media in this expanded region, focusing on the infrastructural and material energies traversing them all. The closest the book comes to fulfilling this promise comes in chapter 5, “Platforms for Public Engagement,” where the authors begin to trace out an Asia-Pacific “meshwork” (a term the authors adopt from Tim Ingold) of biennales and smaller regional art spaces. Unfortunately, despite recurrent gestures towards a more ecological analysis of how art world infrastructures and media technologies play a direct role in generating climate change and environmental pollution, the book insistently pivots back to a more restricted focus on how artists “help to provide alternative ways in which to understand and visualize” (3) these entanglements. Despite continuous reference to non-representational theories, the approach to art presented throughout the book is thoroughly representational, focusing on artists who take up environmental themes in their works and speculation on how this might intervene in the larger environmental imagination (whose environmental imagination this refers to is never made clear).
In recent years, artists taking a thematic approach to environmental issues like climate change or urban pollution have often been criticized for assuming that simply drawing attention to such issues can itself constitute a significant ecological intervention, particularly when the understanding of environmental science presented in such works often remains shallow. I was reminded of this criticism while reading Screen Ecologies, despite the authors’ attempts to argue the contrary. To give one of many examples in the book, Stephen Haley’s digital print showing thousands of plastic water bottles may indeed gesture towards an “excess of consumer culture” (55), but does this in itself constitute a “critical” approach to environmental issues, as the authors suggest? To reference the work of another artist introduced later (Young-Hae Chang’s Heavy Industries), does this work tell audiences anything they don’t already know?
A large part of the problem here is the decontextualized presentation of each work—a curious approach given the supposed ecological focus of the book. In the five sentences dedicated to Haley’s print, for example, we learn the artist is Australian and the lithograph comes from a series focusing on the global production of commodities like bottled water. But we are told nothing about the exhibition context, the audience response, or even the local discourse surrounding plastic waste in Australia. Many of the chapters largely consist of a string of similar brief introductions to different artworks (in the style of an exhibition catalogue), with each paragraph moving not only to a different artist and work but often to an entirely different national context. The effect is often dizzying. Thankfully the book contains many (black-and-white) reproductions throughout, so readers can seek out more details in the images themselves.
The overall structure of the book also suffers from a lack of context or cohesion. The individual chapters jump between a focus on mobile phones and other mobile devices to more formal art genres having little obvious connection to screens. Similarly, the definition of “environment” in some chapters refers to specific issues of environmental degradation like pollution and e-waste, while in other chapters, the environmental focus appears to simply refer to urban space more generally. This range of approaches is most likely due to the book having four authors, who each hail from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia but bring in various art and media/communications interests. Particular site-specific art projects from Larissa Hjorth and Linda Williams are among those receiving the most sustained (and positive) attention in the book, but the text gives no clues as to which author is writing at which point, and there is no explicit reflection on how these different disciplinary and methodological concerns may or may not fit together. The plural authorial voice is not inherently a problem, but the lack of reflection on disciplinary and geographical positioning feels like a missed opportunity here, especially given the questions surrounding the ethics of group projects and the “fly in/out” model of artist ethnography raised in chapter 5.
Finally, a note on the book’s approach to the “Asia-Pacific region.” This unusually broad framing is part of an ongoing project by Larissa Hjorth and others to go beyond traditional national or regional boundaries and define an expanded region (with Australia as the implicit pivot point). Unlike more explicitly trans-national projects, however, the book provides very little detail on how art or media practices in different parts of the region relate to or influence one another, or (equally crucially) how they are often unevenly distributed. Instead, the “Asia-Pacific” here largely emerges as nothing more than a long list of different countries where different artists might be working. While the book’s ability to bring together such a range of artists is exciting, and the desire to draw more attention to eco-critical work in the region is highly admirable, the radically flattened and decontextualized “Asia-Pacific” presented here never quite makes up for the loss in local—or, ironically, ecological—specificity.
Paul Roquet
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
pp. 783-785