[-empyre-] Wired sustainability and Environmental Sensualities

[Patricia Zimmermann]

Environmental Sensualities undergirds all discussions of wired
sustainability.

To splice the sensual into the environmental may, at first, provoke
puzzlement: a disturbing contradiction, an oxymoron, a mash-up of
different logical orders, scrambled code.

The 2008 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival explored the multiple
zones for environmental sensualities. The festival sought to invite our
audiences to engage with each other in an active reimagination of the very
definition of the term environment by interacting across a myriad of media
formations, iterations, and gestations.

External forces can sweep through the natural world—storms, rain, wind,
sunshine, fire, floods, earthquakes, cold, heat. External forces also
travel through less empirical and more intangible planes—ideas, concepts,
ideologies, social relations, politics, repression, resistance. The
popular imaginary stifles the term environment with a reductionist vision,
marking nature as remote, ineffable, overpowering. This same popular
imaginary amputates the sensual from its more collective and emancipatory
forms, shrinking it down to individualistic pleasure channeled into
consumption. A public commons of any sort in this episteme seems
inaccessible, incomprehensible, impossible.

A divide surfaces. On one side, nature is figured as transcendent and
immutable, beyond the body. On the other side, the sensual is marginalized
as chaotic and dangerous, within the body, insignificant, invisible.

Environmental sensualities imagine locations differently, as composed with
many intersecting layers of tactility, aurality, taste, visuality.
Environmental sensualities work the spaces between these limiting
binaries, insisting on interaction to enact and embody change.
Environmental sensualities posit a notion of location that constantly
moves. Location is always relational, often material, and resolutely
collaborative. Environmental sensualities envision locations beyond and
within the body.

Environments, then, constitute in-between zones where we actively
manipulate, engage with, and negotiate external forces. Environments are
not static. They are not places outside of human interaction and
collective action. They are not essences. They are not objects or even
places with definitive borders. For example, contemporary media arts are
migrating away from the discrete, fixed object and artifact (a film, a
video) into the creation of mutable environments: ambient media on plasma
screens, locative media, live performances with archival film,
user-generated content, radical robotics, iterative digital arts—and
embodied, real time discussions and debates. These interstitial zones
between the sensual and the environmental are urgent and critical.

In the liminal zones between bodies as active, sensing agents and the
environment and the natural world as complex systems in flux, openings
emerge. These pathways invent new aesthetic, social, biological, and
political spaces through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting. Rather than
hierarchies, environmental sensualities suggest networks, layers,
clusters—horizontal, continually forming and reforming relationships.

We need to reconsider environments as locations and as provisional nodal
points. Environments need to be reframed as systems comprising incessant
interactions, changes, fluidities, movements, transversals. Environments
may exist, but they can also be produced. Environments are only
sustainable if they are heterogeneous, multiple, complex—and sensual.

The 2008 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival attempted to create a
journey into the various ways in which the sensual connects with the
environmental through our four programming streams—camouflage,
counterpoint, games, and gastronomica. Camouflage plays with seeing.
Counterpoint implies layers imbedded in sonic environments. Games entail
touching. Gastonomica probes the question of taste. All of these
programming streams consider how the senses operate within larger social,
political, aesthetic, and biological matrices. The FLEFF 2008 specially
commissioned live music and silent film events offered a
speculative—rather than definitive—opening into each programming stream.

In the end, wired sustainability demands an exploration into and with the
myriad zones for environmental sensualities.  Wired sustainability
proposes engagement with multiple forms of media, screens, arts, music,
writing, ideas--- as both environments and sensualities.

Our hope was that the FLEFF 2008 disturbances and debates could relocate
us all into a new kind of interstitial zone, a place for imaginings of
wired sustainabilities. In this imaginary zone of camouflage,
counterpoint, games, and gastronomica, the environmental, the sensual, and
the collective just might present the possibility of joining together to
build an energized and contentious public commons.

Patricia and Thomas

Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Cinema and Photography
Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Ithaca College
Ithaca New York 14850 USA
Phone: 607 274 3431    FAX  607 274 7078
http://faculty.ithaca.edu/patty/
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff