Cosmic Archives (After Us)

This paper considers how films that invite viewers to confront the brevity of human life within the deep time of the cosmos also open up to archival questions about what traces remain after the end of human existence. Looking comparatively at films from the silent era that sought to bring astronomy education to cinematic life and and a set of contemporary popular science videos on YouTube that similarly animate cosmic theories, I argue that these films betray the alluring prospect of a future in which human visual regimes retain their power even in the face of human extinction. Within these films, the cosmos, rather than retaining its unassimilable alterity, becomes a cinematic space for imagining a form of anthropocentric permanence.

Hannah Goodwin is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her research revolves around the intersections between scientific and mediatized conceptions of time. Her book Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World explores the entanglements of astronomy and cinema as they channel the past and imagine archives for a future beyond human existence. She has recently published essays in several edited collections, including Uncanny Histories and Contemporary Visual Cultures of the Sublime, and is currently working on a coedited volume, Mediating Deep Time. 

On the End of the Vanishing Point

Often, we bear witness to extinction by documenting and displaying a plethora of images of the earthscapes of crisis. Despite an abundance of things to see – dead animals, ruined landscapes, wildfires, dark zones, and more -- is there not a certain inadequacy in what these images are able to show about the end? For how do you scale an image of planetary endings within such a visual syntax?

In this talk, Gloria Chan Sook Kim examines how a visual impasse – the inability to see into these endings – forms the basis for new modes of seeing, sensing, and knowing. Analyzing data-driven techniques and technologies developed around the militarized project to see into unforeseeable futures of microbial catastrophe, she argues that a novel mode of non-optical seeing has surfaced precisely at this impasse: “the calculative imaginary” – a flourishing of numeracy, data, calculations, and quantification. Drawing upon histories of vision where the vanishing point designates the furthest visible distance on a receding horizon, Kim examines how vision has become reformatted and redefined at the limit of opticality. What novel forms of vision have surfaced on the end of the vanishing point?

Gloria Chan Sook Kim is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of California-Riverside. Her research works across histories and theories of vision, computation and culture, environmental media, and infrastructure and systems. She is the author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War Against Emerging Microbes. Her articles have appeared in the journals Configurations, ASAP/Journal, and Consumption Markets and Culture. 

Homo Terminus/ Nostalgic Waters

An excerpt from a book project titled "Homo Terminus: The Specter of Human Extinction," this talk explores plausible futures in which a post-sapiens species returns to the sea, the place where life began. It draws on ideas of evolutionary non-linearity, the  “hopeful” side of extinction as transformation (with or without catastrophe), and critical cultural analysis. Materials interrogated include recent fossil finds that morphed into popular internet memes, the paleontology of whales, and filmic and literary representations of whale/human relations. 

Shane Greene is an anthropologist by training (PhD, U Chicago). Skeptic by choice. Professor at Indiana University Bloomington with stints as a Visiting Professor at MIT, University of Manchester, and La Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru, also the country where he's done much of his research. Broad interests in social theory, popular culture, resistance, anarchism, art, music, race, class, and the end times for homo sapiens. Musician when there's time.

FirstCow at the End of the World

“First Cow at the End of the World” is derived from Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s new book, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024), whose titular concept designates that which is both of and against life, that which filibusters the conversion, in the terms laid out by Donna Haraway, of staying with the trouble into making kin. The talk zooms in on Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019) and other examples of anti-pastoral cinema that attribute ecocriticism’s desire for harmonious co-habitation and historical redress to an absent cause. First Cow subtracts the ground of ecocriticism’s reality-testing, or its recognition of the difference between the external and internal worlds. In so doing, the film invites spectators to mistrust its title’s promise of origin stories and progress myths, and to think ecology from negativity.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and a co-author, with Steven Swarbrick, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, “Superimpositions” series, 2024). Jean-Thomas is currently working on a book tentatively titled “To Mean the World: Climate Action and Liberal Catastrophe,” which is funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and excerpts from which have appeared in Critical Inquiry and Representations.

Steven Swarbrick is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and The Earth Is Evil (University of Nebraska Press, “Provocations” series, forthcoming). He is a co-author with Jean-Thomas Tremblay of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, “Superimpositions” series, 2024). He is currently working on two books: “Unknowing Sex: Shakespeare against the Historicists” and “Laughing in the End Times: The Death Drive in Nature and Out.”  

Left Standing

Left Standing is a video and word collage performance of an emergent collective affect, using fragmented elements from cultural, industrial and scientific imaginaries around earthly life and the potential colonization of other planets. Focusing on dimensions of ordinary human engagement with the nonhuman earthly world, the overall scenario presents encounters with animals who wander a neighborhood after a woods has been razed and developed, and with the trees, grasses, waters, and crops in the leftover woods and its surrounding farmlands. This presentation will invite discussion about our collective feelings of place and displacement at a moment of ecological, social, and epistemological precarity and continuity. 

Susan Lepselter is Associate Professor of American Studies, and an affiliate of Anthropology, Folklore, and Cultural Studies, at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research explores the poetics and affects of popular media and everyday life in contemporary American culture. She is the author of The Resonance of Unseen Things: Power, Poetics, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny, winner of the 2017 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. She also has published on topics including monsters, hoarding, and neurodivergent identities online. She is currently working on a book of poetry whose origins were supported by a New Frontiers Experimentation Award at IU.

Flood

In this talk Salar Mameni discusses the extreme heat waves, flooding and cyclones that have affected the southern coastal regions of Pakistan, with the most recent flood occurring in summer 2022, through the work of the contemporary Pakistani artist Zahra Malkani. The talk centers Malkani’s soundscapes and visual multi-modal presentations of spiritual, activist, and mourning practices of coastal communities as an entry point into a conversation about climate disasters, extractive economies, aesthetic practices, and indigenous grieving traditions. Through the notion of the “oceanic feeling,” a term Malkani uses for her audio-visual recordings, Mameni discusses the incongruency of the spiritual and the psychoanalytic and how the ocean, and other bodies of water, have come to signify both the depths of the psyche and the ungraspable flows of the sacred.

Salar Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke, 2023) and Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an art historian with expertise in artistic practices in the contemporary Arab/Muslim world with focus on ecological thought. Mameni's writings have appeared in the journals Catalyst, Ramus, Signs, Qui Parle, Women and Performance, Al-Raida and Resilience among others. He has also written for catalogues of exhibitions in Pakistan, Dubai, Sharjah, and Istanbul.