UC Berkeley

The geology of media is an emerging topic in the field of media studies in western nations, aiming to provide a geological perspective for the study and criticism of media art, and to help analyse four levels of geology of media artworks: the geophysics of the production and disposal of media materiality; the geological events represented and reconstructed by media art; the interpenetration and entanglement of geological events and human material activities; the intersection of traces of geological objects and human affective memories; and the Intersection of the geological objects and human emotional memories. By analysing the geological theories of Jussi Parikka and Sasha Litvintseva, as well as the films Salarium and Behemoth , this essay aims to develop a more dynamic and complex geological framework with which to try to deal with the particular place of Chinese eco-cinema in the global Anthropocene, with a view to contributing to the current field of ecocriticism.