In Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants, Janet Janzen traces the motif of the “dynamic plant” through film and literature in early 20th century German culture. Often discussed solely as symbols or metaphors of the human experience, plants become here the primary focus and their role in literature and film is extended beyond their symbolic function. Plants have been (and still are) seen as closer to static objects than to living, moving beings. Making use of examples from film and literature, Janet Janzen demonstrates a shift in the perception of plants-as-objects to plants-as-living-beings that can be attributed to new technology and also to the return of Romantic and Vitalistic discourses on nature.

A Cultural History of Plants in the Modern Era covers the period from 1920 to today - a time when population growth, industrialization, global trade, and consumerism have fundamentally reshaped our relationship with plants. Advances in agriculture, science, and technology have revolutionised the ways we feed ourselves, whilst urbanization and industrial processing have reduced our direct connection with living plants. At the same time, our understanding of both ecology and conservation have greatly increased and our appreciation of the meanings and aesthetics of plants continue to suffuse art and everyday culture. The modern era has witnessed a revolution in both the valuation and the destruction of the natural world - more than ever before, we understand that the vitality of our relationship with plants will shape our future. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants. Stephen Forbes is an independent scholar and writer, based in Australia. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Plants set. General Editors: Annette Giesecke, University of Delaware, USA, and David Mabberley, University of Oxford, UK.

This book addresses the increasingly important subject of ecomedia by critically examining the interconnections between environment, ecology, media forms, and popular culture in the Southeast Asian region, exploring methods such as textual analysis, thematic analysis, content analysis, participatory ethnography, auto ethnography, and semi-structured interviewing. It is divided into four sections: I. Activism, Environment, and Indigeneity; II. Political, Ecologies and Urban Spaces; III. Narratives, Discourses, and Aesthetics; and IV. Imperialism, Nationalism, and Islands, covering topics such as broadcast media (radio and TV) and the environment; green cinema and ecodocumentaries, ecodigital art, digital environmental literature. It is of great interest to researchers, students, practitioners and scholars working in the area of humanities, media, communications, cultural studies, environmental humanities, environmental studies, and sustainability.

How Richard Riemerschmid’s designs of everyday—but “extraordinary”—objects recalibrate our understanding of modernism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German artist Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) was known as a symbolist painter and, by the advent of World War I, had become an important modern architect. This, however, the first English-language book on Riemerschmid, celebrates his understudied legacy as a designer of everyday objects—furniture, tableware, clothing—that were imbued with an extraordinary sense of vitality and even personality. Freyja Hartzell makes a case for the importance of Riemerschmid's designed objects in the development of modern design—and for the power of everyday things to change the way we live our lives, understand history, and design our future. Hartzell offers for the first time an interpretive history of Riemerschmid's design practice embedded in a fresh examination of modernism told by the objects themselves. Hartzell explores Riemerschmid's early drawings, paintings, and prints; his interiors and housewares, which represent a modernist shift from exclusive image to accessible object; his designs for women's clothing; his immensely popular wooden furniture; his serially produced ceramics and their appeal to German nationalism of the period; and his complex and compelling pattern designs for textiles and wallpapers, the only part of his creative practice that spanned his entire career. Riemerschmid, Hartzell writes, was at his most inventive, playful, and free when designing things for everyday use. His uniquely designed forms allow us to recognize the utilitarian object not just as a tool but as an individual being—a thing with a soul.

An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective. What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In Living Surfaces, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka explore how the surface of the Earth has, over the last two centuries, become known and perceived as an environment of images. Living Surfaces features a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces. Mapping these different scales of vegetal images, Gil-Fournier and Parikka help us understand core questions that pertain to the artistic and architectural reference points for the Anthropocene. With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, Living Surfaces is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.

The Mediality of Sugar probes the potential of reading sugar as a mediator across some of the disciplinary distinctions in early twenty-first century research in the arts, literature, architecture, and popular culture. Selected artistic practices and material cultures of sugar across Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century are investigated and connected to the transcontinental and transoceanic history of the sugar plants cane and beet, their botanical and cultural dissemination, and global sugar capital and trade under colonialism and in decoloniality. The collection contributes to the vision of a Transnational and Postdisciplinary Sugar Studies.

Most scholars study postrevolutionary Mexico as a period in which cultural production significantly shaped national identity through murals, novels, essays, and other artifacts that registered the changing political and social realities in the wake of the Revolution. In Biocosmism, Jorge Quintana Navarrete shifts the focus to examine how a group of scientists, artists, and philosophers conceived the manifold relations of the human species with cosmological forces and nonhuman entities (animals, plants, inorganic matter, and celestial bodies, among others). Drawing from recent theoretical trends in new materialisms, biopolitics, and posthumanism, this book traces for the first time the intellectual constellation of biocosmism or biocosmic thought: the study of universal life understood as the vital vibrancy that animates everything in the cosmos from inorganic matter to living organisms to outer space. It combines both analysis of unexplored areas—such as Alfonso L. Herrera’s plasmogeny—and innovative readings of canonical texts like Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica to examine how biocosmism produced a wide array of utopian projects and theorizations that continue to challenge anthropocentric, biopolitical frameworks.

A groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime that will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out. Slime. The very word seems to ooze oily menace, conjuring up a variety of unpleasant associations: mucous, toxins, reptiles, pollutants, and other unsavory viscous semi-liquid substances. Yet without slime, the natural world would be completely unrecognizable; in fact, life itself as we know it would be impossible In this deft and fascinating book, journalist Susanne Wedlich takes us on a tour of all things slimy, from the most unctuous of science fiction monsters to the biochemical compounds that are the very building blocks of life. Along the way she shows us what slime really means, and why slime is not something to fear, but rather something to ... embrace.

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of “theory” not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity’s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.