Thomas Lamarre | Harvesting Light

Discussions of environmental media tend, as if ineluctably, to introduce a rigid divide between economy and ecology, with infrastructures, markets, and geopolitical forces on one side of destruction, while ecology implies an utterly different, highly vulnerable set of processes.  This talk aims to reconsider some of these seemingly insuperable divides through a focus on artificial photosynthesis, which is often described as a form of bioinspiration, biomimicry, or homeotechnology.  

Part of what is interesting about artificial photosynthesis is that it tentatively blurs and contests the distinction between artificial and natural. It thus encourages a rethinking of the production of value in terms of a systematicity that does not rely on a strict divide between economy and ecology. Lamarre proposes to explore the production of value by opening a dialogue between artificial photosynthesis and some recent thinkers of environmental Marxism such as Jason Moore and Saitō Kōhei.  In this way, he also hopes to reconsider what media studies has to offer environmental studies in an era of anthropogenetic climate change.
 

About the Speaker

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Thomas Lamarre teaches in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.  Publications on media, thought, and material history include work on communication networks in ninth-century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000); silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005); animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018).  Major translations include Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (2012), Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon, and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2012), David Lapoujade’s William James, Empiricism, and Pragmatism (2019), and Isabelle Stengers’s Making Sense in Common (2023).

This event is co-sponsored with the Fiber Optics: Plant Fiber Materials and Visuality research workshop.