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Mediating Ecologies
Cultivating Diplomacy, Destabilising Paradigms
Abstract Ecology, Bruno Latour writes, is a “new way to handle all the objects of human and non-human collective life … Nature is here considered as what assembles all entities into one whole.” Media ecologies, it follows, may illuminate not only such relationships, but also the mediated nature of connections, representations, and engagement opportunities. The 2016 exhibition “Reset Modernity!” at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, which Latour co-curated with Martin Guinard-Terrin, Donato Ricci, and Christophe Leclercq, offered one such opportunity for participants of the Heidelberg “Media Ecologies” workshop. Arguing that environmental destruction is often fueled by tenets of “progress,” growth, and the nature/society dichotomy, the exhibition aims to disorient and gently “reset” visitors’ paradigms of (ecological) observation and representation. In this essay, I recount the hope expressed by workshop participants that that digital and environmental humanities can destabilize paradigms, allay fears, cultivate diplomacy, and amplify serendipity. I reflect on this in light of our visit to the exhibition “Reset Modernity!”.
Keywords Ecology, Environmental Humanities, Exhibitions, Latour, Reset Modernity!
