Digital Animalities by Jody Berland

Digital Animalities by Jody Berland

Exploring where animality meets digital media in the shadow of climate crisis

Digital Animalities is a groundbreaking investigation into the entanglements of animal life, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in a time of environmental precarity and digital saturation. Revealing the digital as a dynamic site where animal agency and technological systems collide, the contributors eschew simplistic binaries to emphasize complex mediations between animals and digital media.

From wildlife camera traps and virtual zoos to gaming environments and animation tools, these essays explore how animals are captured, played with, and consumed through digital technologies, elaborating their agency in these mediations of ecological and biopolitical processes. Rethinking animality as a fluid and contested terrain shaped by climate change, extinction pressures, and emerging ecopolitical paradigms, Digital Animalities shifts how we consider the impact of the digital on sentient lives and their futures.

Contributors: Giovanni Aloi, Art Institute of Chicago; Etienne S. Benson, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; Sarah Bezan, U College Cork; Michael Fisch, U of Chicago; Kate Galloway, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Brian McCormack; Jonathan Osborn; Hannah Tollefson, U of Toronto Scarborough; Tom Tyler, U of Leeds; Paul Wells, Loughborough U; Hang Wu.

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Jody Berland is professor emerita and senior scholar in the Department of Humanities at York University. She is author of North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space and Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures and coeditor of Cultures of Militarization.

Thomas Lamarre is Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Language and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation and The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, both from Minnesota.