International symposium
media/environment
Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis
26+27 august 2026
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
What is the planetary footprint of media technology?
The two-day symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis brings together some of the most prominent voices in the global debate surrounding media’s entanglements with the living world.
Join us for talks and Q&As on how media shape, record, and strain our environments. Speakers from three continents will present the latest research on themes ranging from the colonial materiality of film and operative images of extraction to film archives in a warming world, media’s role in the environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration, and the ecological footprint of digital screen culture and artificial intelligence.
Whether you are interested in media studies, environmental humanities, STS, history, or the arts – and whether you are a scholar, student, practitioner, or simply curious – this symposium invites you to rethink media’s planetary footprint from the archive to the algorithm, from screen to stream.
By bringing into conversation an international cohort of scholars, artists and students whose work is rooted in distinct methodologies and ecological contexts, the symposium serves as a platform for a more globally attuned research agenda on media and environmental futures.
Confirmed speakers
The symposium program is currently being finalized. The complete presentation, panel discussion and film screening program will be announced shortly.
Michelle Henning
University of Liverpool
Photography’s Broken Contract: Environmental Relations and Technological Imaging
Fieke Jansen
University of Amsterdam
Securing the Market: AI, Predicting Hazards, and Managing Vulnerability
Sigrid Kannengießer
University of Münster
Environmental Perspectives on Digital Technologies and AI Infrastructures
Salomé Lopes Coelho
Utrecht University
Ecologies of Extractive Violence Across Non-Fiction Film
Ryo Okubo
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo
Materiality and Finitude: Munesuke Mita’s Theory of Information and Japanese Media Studies
Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna
University of Lodz
Intertwining Scopes: Assessing the Environmental Footprint of an AI-Driven Art Project
Elena Past
Wayne State University, Detroit
Fire and the Archive: Climate Change, the Mediterranean, and the Istituto LUCE
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
University College London
Reverse Engineering Climate Collapse: Or Doing Film History Backwards
Hunter Vaughan
Emerson College, Boston
Sustainable Digitalisation? The Social Threats and Environmental Costs of a Digital Screen Culture
María Vélez-Serna
Independent scholar
Operative Images and Environmental Futures in Extractive Landscapes
Anne-Katrin Weber
University of Lausanne
Entangled Flows: Automobility and Television in Postwar Switzerland
Wu Chi-Yu
Media artist, Taipei
Does Celluloid Dream of Camphor Forests? Colonial Extraction and the Material Prehistory of the Moving Image
Roundtable discussion
Environmental Impacts of Media Tech in Practice
Jasper Snoeren
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Alex de Vries-Gao
Digiconomist / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Tobias Wilbrink
GreenScreen Netherlands
film screening
stories of celluloid: phantom gaze / terra nullius data
Wu Chi-Yu, 2025
dead zones
Suzette Bousema, 2025
agrilogistics / bliss point
Gerard Ortin, 2021 / 2023
Interested? Register here.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Presentations will also be streamed online, but this is primarily an in-person event.
stay updated
Follow this website to stay updated – more information and the full program will follow soon.