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Seán Cubitt guest talk on ecocriticism

Professor Seán Cubitt’s online talk on current debates in ecocritique and media, organized by the new Aarhus University research program Environmental Media and Aesthetics.

Info about event

Time

Tuesday 12 December 2023,  at 09:00 - 10:30

Location

Online Webinar on Zoom - see link below

 

Online Webinar on Zoom:

https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/62958825811

Tandoori Chicken Barbecue

Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne

ABSTRACT

The recipe* for tandoori paste has ten herbs and spices (including garam masala which has another eleven**) plus yoghurt, lemon juice, oil and salt. I use local organic chicken thighs and cook on a kettle barbie over wood. Cooking is a medium: it transforms things from the world, using energies of the world. Ecocritical interest in materials encourages tracing the sources and journeys of ingredients and equipment. Cooking is also a medium of conviviality and culture with deep historical and anthropological roots that raise ethical and aesthetic questions connecting sensory experience of natural, technical and cultural processes to emergent futures – the dish and eating it. As a medium, then, cooking is also an act of imagination. Ecocriticism has either pursued understanding of the materials or the aesthetics of cultural artefacts, but rarely the two together. There may be a divergence of incommensurable discourses – materials and experience, systems and imagination – dividing ecocritical thought between past and future, where things came from and where they are going. Or …

* https://nishkitchen.com/wp-json/mv-create/v1/creations/317/print

** https://www.daringgourmet.com/wprm_print/56048

BIO

Seán Cubitt is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema EffectEcomedia, The Practice of Light, Finite Media, Anecdotal Evidence and Truth. He pursues an ecocritical approach to the history and philosophy of media and the media arts.