RAVE: Megan Bickel
Megan Bickel (MA Student, Digital Studies), “Science Fiction, Future Memory, and Effective Digital Solastalgia.”
Sasha Crawford-Holland (PhD, Cinema and Media Studies) will offer a response.
Megan Bickel (MFA, University of Louisville) (she/ they) is a Master's Candidate in Digital Studies for Language, Culture, and History (Department of the Humanities). Her research focuses on the materiality and aesthetic affect of social superstructures such as the internet or the climate crisis. Her current thesis research poses a new term to the lexicon of solastalgia: digital solastalgia (DS). DS explores the relationships between dystopic media consumption within Western populations and psychological responses to images depicting violent climate events or climate trauma. These observations stemming from psychology, aesthetics, and media theory are then applied critically to examine the labeling procedures within Google's Vision API as unethical and ignorant of violence in the interpretation of images documenting events or victimization within the climate crisis.
Their MFA research utilized holographic imaging technologies as a materially utopian metaphor. This research was executed through authorship, digital editing, and an exhibition of painting and installation. Bickel is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer working at the intersections of painting and new media. She is the founder and organizer of houseguest gallery based in Louisville, Kentucky. They have exhibited internationally, most notably at KMAC (Louisville, Kentucky), Fitzrovia Gallery (London, UK), and numerous universities.
Sasha Crawford-Holland: I am a settler scholar, PhD student, and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where I study how people use nonfiction media to (re)organize power relations across a range of institutional and historical contexts. Currently, my research examines the aesthetic politics of thermal evidence in documentary film, television, and digital media.
Prior to arriving in Chicago, I completed a B.A. in Cultural Studies at McGill University (2015) and an M.A. in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California (2018), where I was an Annenberg Fellow. At UChicago, I have co-coordinated the Digital Media Workshop since 2019 and programmed the exhibition Indigenous Futurisms in VR. My writing on the politics of media is published in Film History, Television & New Media, Synoptique, and American Quarterly, and received Screen’s Annette Kuhn Debut Essay Award.
Refreshments will be served!
Image Credit (paired images: left: Image from unknown photographer, image mined from Google search including terms "New York Times" and "climate crisis" on March 8th, 2022. ( Right Image) is half of a film still from the opening credits of The Day After Tomorrow (directed by Roland Emmerich, 2004).