Media and video art practice of the last twenty years coincided with the harrowing expansion of climate degradation. While the effects of climate change had been anticipated before 2000, they took shape ubiquitously and lethally post-2000, bringing new challenges about whether and how to imagine a future for shared life on the planet. These effects coincided also with a deeper historical understanding of how we got here, tracking the history of extractive economies and their imbrication with the forces of gender, race, colonialism, and a human-centered anthropocentricism.

This lecture gathers a range of artists and artworks to chronicle the central themes of ecologically-responsive media art practice of the last twenty years, as well as a range of artistic techniques. Ecological effects bring new obstacles to the aesthetic imagination even as they inspire and require that imagining. Time-based media art thus becomes a particularly potent vehicle for addressing the most urgent crises of our time.

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