Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis

The international symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis confronts the question of how media both represent and materially transform the natural environment in a warming world.

Prominent speakers from three continents will present the latest research on topics ranging from the materiality of film and the finitude of resources to images of extraction, film archives, the colonial and environmental history of photochemical cinema, media’s role in the environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration, and the ecological footprint of digital screen culture and artificial intelligence.

A roundtable brings together perspectives from the media industry, cultural institutions, and archives on how these sectors are responding to the concrete environmental challenges of media tech.

In collaboration with Rialto VU Griffioen, the symposium also features a short film program exploring the extractive history of celluloid, food production, and oceanic dead zones.

Are you interested in media studies, environmental humanities, science, technology, history, or the arts? Whether you are a scholar, student, practitioner or simply curious, this symposium invites you to join us in rethinking media’s planetary footprint from the archive to the algorithm, from screen to stream.

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)

For more information and to register for the symposium, visit mediaenv.ehc-amsterdam.nl.

Organised by: VU Chair for Media and Culture, Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam & CINEAGRI

Time: 09:30 - 17:00