ecology

This collection emerges from a panel hosted by the Modern Language Association's MS Forum on Visual Media (http://naturalmedia.org/titles/) in 2017. "Natural media" re-valuates the communicative potential of natural spaces, especially in instances where symbolic import collides with raw matter in a manner that hides from, disguises, or elides stark reality. It considers intersections, collisions, tensions, opportunities, and affordances that arise in the discussion of "Natural Media," both broadly conceived and in its contributors' particular areas of research. It is also in close conversation with research inspired by a previous gathering on a closely related topic: Digital and Natural Ecologies.

In this review of Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, Robert Seguin contemplates the implication of the text's eponymous subject on art, philosophy, and politics. The "hyperobject," a hypothetical agglomeration of networked interactions with the potential to produce inescapable shifts in the very conditions of existence, emerges as the key consideration for the being in the present.

Rob Swigart asks why we keep hearing about a technological fix (dubious) and rarely about adaptation as a viable response to global warming.

Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding's Animate Earth and James Lovelock's recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.

Laura Dassow Walls explores how 'deliberative' reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.