Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics is a book by Elizabeth Swanstrom that I discovered while browsing through Google Books. Unlike many of the books that I have found in the college library, this one is actually very up to date, having been written in 2016. This means it has very recent technologies in mind, and can talk about them in an up to date context.
What drew me to this book was the way it intricately links nature and technology, which is the main theme running throughout my visual sketchbook. Swanstrom acknowledges early on that "Artists are increasingly forging connections between digital aesthetics and ecological poetics that are viable and vibrant, but their efforts have not, as yet, been widely acknowledged. The reasons for this are complex, but at their base lurk deep-rooted cultural beliefs that tells us that nature is opposed to digital technology." She goes on to talk about the context of these beliefs. "From the height of the Cold War to the turn of the twenty-first century, particularly, our cultural narratives tend to treat nature and computers as mutually exclusive entities." It is within our films - she cites the Matrix franchise, as well as Blade Runner and The Terminator - movies that "signalied a world on the brink of environmental devastation and human enslavement to the machine" as cruxes for society's distrust of robots, AI, and modern technology.
I want to read more of the book, but only segments are available on Google Books. Still, it will serve as a highly valuable source to back up some of my points, and offer counter-points that I had not considered.
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