Steven Stergar
University of Udine (Italy)
How to Propose an Environmental Awareness for the Contemporary Media Landscape
Ecology, Participation, Resistance
In these last years, the gaze of the human being is observing the globalization’s effects on the landscape. The capitalized subject seems to have underestimated, or worse ignored, a series of voracious actions that are causing disasters to ecosystems, altering their regular vital rhythm. In this scenario, we could say that in the name of progress the last anthropological century has undergone a kind of super-evolution (Gould, 1972), which has favored that phenomenon known today as the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2000). Indeed, our current production system has a complex economic policy antithetical to environmental and ethical issues, generating at the same time the spread of pollutants necessary to support people’s consumer needs. In the same way, even the development of the media landscape has its faults: mineral extraction practices, planned obsolescence and waste production, are just some of the instance that demonstrate this. For these reasons, contemporary media studies promote within their agenda a series of reflections on the eco-sustainability for the planet and media landscape itself. Among these, the suggestions proposed by exponents of the (digital) Commons Ideology (Boyle, 2008; Bollier, 2014), sustainable art and the so-called Ecocinema (Macdonald, 2004), become today concrete examples for the teaching of an environmental awareness (Morin, 2014) which is indispensable more than ever. Starting from these approaches, it is aim of the proposal being able to provide further reflections on the dissemination and promotion of this environmental awareness, taking into consideration not only the contemporary relationship between subjects and media, but also its polluting effects and the searching of new sustainable spaces.
Steven Stergar obtained a post-master’s degree in Science of Audiovisual Heritage and New Media at the University of Udine, discussing a thesis on the phenomenological and methodological potentialities of Media Education in both formal and informal fields (supervisors Professor Mariapia Comand and Professor Simone Venturini). He studied also at the Ruhr Universität Bochum for a Summer Term, attending courses and presentation about film and media studies. He currently works in the Digital Storytelling Lab (Dipartimento di Studi umanistici e del patrimonio culturale, University of Udine), as a tutor for film/media literacy projects. Since 2019, he is a member of the Scientific committee of Associazione Premio Sergio Amidei, where he is an editor of a section dedicated to contemporary independent Italian cinema.