Open Panel #171: "Desperate Media"

When all else fails, we are left with desperation: extravagant recklessness, scrappy desire, a call to create new worlds through inventive forms, even as temperatures rise.

We ask what media might come through desperate measures, desperate times, and desperate conditions; and to what extent a practice of desperate media shapes such conditions. Desperate media are not sustainable continuations of extant media, but rather new births to emerging conditions and disasters. Where sustainability typically enrolls processes and systems designed to persist through unpredictable conditions, desperate media conjure immediate presents that shake up what it means to make things—forms, practices, and communities— act.

We ask, then: what media forms and practices might emerge through a deluge of desperate measures, desperate times, and desperate conditions? To what extent does a practice of desperate media shape and become shaped by everyday desperation? What tensions and turns become available to science and technology studies, media studies, and allied fields when we attend to emergent conditions, inequities, and disasters?

We invite participants to think with us about how desperate media figures into their own inquiry. This panel seeks participation from a broad range of academic disciplines and creative practices seeking to design and understand media forms responding to climate catastrophe, systemic inequity, and resource extractivism. We hope that desperate media serves as a guiding framework for work focused on different media forms and environmental conditions, with particular attention to how we communicate this relationship in states of desperation.

Thinking with Rita Raley’s (2020) “adversarial methods” and Boyle, Brown & Ceraso’s (2018) digitality as a "multisensory, embodied condition,” we offer that desperate media practices afford opportunities to refigure our response to ongoing injury, ongoing catastrophe, and ongoing injustice. Through desperate media, we posit, perhaps sustainability—and in turn, the stories we tell about how to sustain—takes new shape.

Please contact Trent Wintermeier (trentwintermeier@utexas.edu) and/or Hannah Hopkins (hannah.hopkins@utexas.edu) with any questions. Submissions are due on https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php by January 31st.