Signals of nature, prestidigital ecology

Abstract

This article combines ecocritical readings of three digital texts – the iPad app ‘Grass’ and Ian Bogost’s games Guru Meditation and A Slow Year – with analytical ‘field notes’ from teaching these texts in recent EcoMedia seminars. This hybrid approach helps us encounter these digital texts in ways that produce unique insights relevant to ecocritical thought and pedagogy. The article argues that digital texts with overt signals of ‘Nature’ combine visual perceptions, bodily motions that are simultaneously outside and inside digital spaces, and psychological challenges that leverage memory and anticipation in unique ways that lead us into acts of ecological prestidigitation – sleight of hand. By studying such digital prestidigitation, we can perceive the illusions that have prevented us from thinking and being ecological. Thus liberated, we begin to explore ecology where new ways where algorithms, magic, and imagination meet.

Keywords:

• ecomedia
• pedagogy
• object-oriented ontology
• ecocriticism
• ecopoetry

Acknowledgment

Special thanks to all of the students who explored EcoMedia with each other and me during J-Terms 2012 and 2013.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Hageman

Andy Hageman is Assistant Professor of English at Luther College, where he teaches American Literature, Film, Literature & Ecology, and Paideia. His research concentrates on specific machine figures in techno-cultural history, and he has recently published essays on Mary Shelley’s Frankentsein, László Krasznahorkai and the aesthetics of dead whales, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.