| dc.description.abstract | In times of climate crisis, the question of reimagining society ecologically is more
urgent than ever. The response to the ecological crisis remains inadequate, and
global climate change mitigation goals are increasingly considered unrealistic. To
break through the limitations of contemporary politics to tackle the crisis, this
thesis considers an ecological aesthetic politics – that is to say, an aesthetically
conceived framework for reimagining politics ecologically. In order to do so, this
thesis discusses what Jacques Rancière calls the sensible, that which can be
perceived and thought in a particular configuration of reality. In contemporary
western society, this sensibility falls short in perceiving and thinking a way out of
ecological disequilibrium. Therefore, it must be reimagined, for which aesthetic
politics provide fecund ground. In this thesis, as it is situated in media studies, such
an aesthetic-political imaginary is first historically traced, and then adapted to
contemporary medial forms. It is argued that an ecological sensibility can be
negotiated when medial forms go through an aesthetic-political transformation.
Historically, this transition is identified in the art movement of Impressionism.
The Impressionists changed academic painting by leaving the studio for the
outdoors, dismantling the stability of perception and blending it with natural
inspiration. This transformation was taken a step further by the literary
impressionists, who conceived of the nonhuman objects of human perception as
having a subjectivity of their own. With this precedent, this thesis examines
contemporary media of animation film and videogames to bolster contemporary
understandings of an ecological aesthetic politics based on shared principles of
instable perception and nonhuman subjectivity. Their interpretations exemplify
how animation film is continuous with Impressionism’s strategies of pictorial
redefinition, and also envision how such a framework would prospectively apply
in the medium of videogames, by constructing an ecological aesthetic politics
model from the ground up. Because of the origin of the principles of ecological
aesthetic politics, this framework may be referred to as ecological impressionism. | |
