By Jessica Johnston

September 2022

Surry Hills

I walk into Dan’s café, warmed by his smiling face. The brass edges of the American oak bar glimmer in the sunlight while kids with milk moustaches trace their fingers along the white lettering on the windows. I hear the whirring sound of milk steaming, the light pop of the barista tamping the espresso, transforming fine granules into a syrupy elixir that seems to produce a momentary suspension of time and space in which everything is completely alright in the world.

By Cristalle Smith

My stepfather is an evolutionary biologist. Former zookeeper, elephant keeper. He tells me about the time he punched an elephant out of fear, frustration. His hand broke in three places and the elephant didn’t blink.

By Anna Artyushina

On March 28, 1946, Albert Camus gave his famous lecture, The Crisis of Man, at Columbia University. Similar to Hanna Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, he was reflecting on the factors that led so many Europeans to commit unimaginable acts of cruelty. According to Camus, the triumph of bureaucracy in the 20th century made Europeans feel and act less humanely. Arendt demonstrated that totalitarian regimes were highly effective at normalizing negative attitudes toward others and absolving individuals of ethical responsibility for their actions.

By Matt Parker

Over the past eight years I have developed a research methodology that focuses on multimodal listening in encounters with media infrastructures. I approach the practice of listening as something which can be both auditory and nonauditory; as much a process of cultural technique as an affective response to external stimulus.

By Tamara Kneese and Émeline Brulé

My forthcoming book, Death Glitch, highlights the difficulties of handing down digital belongings from one generation to the next. Tangible heirlooms that one might inherit, like a grandmother’s brooch, are generally one-of-a-kind objects. They are marked by patina–or visible age–and the weight of historical, kin-based relationships. Digital remains, however, are composed of data and metadata, reproducible, tied to corporate platforms, and highly changeable.

By The Environmental Media Lab

EML: Tell us what you’re listening to, watching and reading these days; what concepts you’re drawing from to make art.

DM: So many things! I find comfort in television shows I’ve watched before—they seem safe during these ongoing and never-ending pandemic times.

By Patrick Smith

What are the uses and misuses of computer vision and artificial intelligence? How can technologies indissolubly wedded to modalities of surveillance and capture be taken up subversively, made to speak back to the technics of state and corporate power?

By The Environmental Media Lab

EML: When we heard/saw you present your work at the geography conference (winter 2022), you explained that you used flood data to generate poetry. Can you explain this process?

by Andrew Bateman

The GIF (series of images) above was generated with five hundred images taken by a “critter cam,” a cheap infrared camera triggered by a motion sensor or programmed for a time-lapse and used by hunters to locate wildlife hotspots.

by Cheryl Thompson

In 2020, the social justice hashtag was everywhere. Some of the most circulated hashtags on social media at the time were: #georgefloyd #blacklivesmatter #blm #justiceforgeorgefloyd #breonnataylor #icantbreathe #policebrutality #nojusticenopeace #ahmaudarbery.

by Andrea Zeffiro

In the image above, the cutout figures of Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg collide with the iconography of prominent insurrectionists who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

by Sandra Smeltzer

I have always hated winter as an adult. An avid hiker and kayaker, I never took to the more obvious winter sports of skating or skiing.

by Gina Freeman & Tessa J. Brown

Snow has fallen overnight, five centimeters or so blanketing the ground as I head out to meet Gina on Prince’s Island Park. It’s 11am, later than we meant to meet–Gina’s been up since 6am for an early morning yoga class.

by Alisor South

Capitalism is the milkshake that brings all the boys to the yard. It’s the part of your brain you think with and the air you breathe. It’s the reason why people do things and how people perceive things. It’s also a poison to independent thought.

by Marcus B. Young

it was like the crisis in the 80’s – the inverts, as they were – coupled with it, married to it, indispensable. life was bridled, in despair, they were. the flits found no escape – eschatological, prophetic, unwise. there was no exodus. the wise men found no antidote, no omnipotent to deliver.

by Susan Cahill

When I first encountered Shaheer Tarar’s installation, Jack Pine (2019), I was taken in by the title and its deliberate reference to Tom Thomson’s oil painting, The Jack Pine (1916-7). The Thomson version is arguably one of the best-known images in the history of Canadian art.

by Henriette Steiner & Kristin Veel

In May 2020, we published Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture (MIT Press), a cultural history of gigantism in architecture and digital culture, from the Eiffel Tower to the World Trade Center.

by Tricia Toso & Pier-Olivier Tremblay

We begin our story in the parking lot of a Windsor Salt Company distribution centre located in what is known today as Montreal, Canada [1]. On the other side of a chain link fence are hundreds of pallets of market-ready bags of salt for consumers to buy and spread over the sidewalks and entrance ways of their homes and businesses.

by Kate Maddalena

This story happens on the kind of late summer day pictured below, a day when I took my son to a local lake to throw stones, ride his bicycle, and, when we were both good and sweaty, to swim. Like many mothers, I love to be in ‘nature’. I feel connected to it, humbled by it.

by Joshua Neves

“I had suppressed the reasons I felt compelled to write this book…” Jason Pine confesses in the preface to his spellbinding The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition. I will leave the author to tell his own story. But it is a story (or, rather, many stories) that has stayed with me.