Introduction

These debates are critical as we rethink the future of global citizenship, which depends on our capacity to communicate across cultures and species to reimagine the worlds we share. Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies maintains that cinema and media artists, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to our common twenty-first-century problems, have much to contribute to this discussion. The book argues that in the present context there is an urgent need to engage with the complex meanings of world images, especially those produced by contemporary forms of media. Images of one world or of the whole planet have particular resonance for us today as technologies of data visualization mobilize new understandings of the earth, producing a “digital earth” and along with it, new forms of knowledge, power, and objectivity upon which decisions about the future of the planet will rest.³

By looking back at several cinema and media experiments of the twentieth century, this book tells the story of intercultural and interspecies communication through specific examples and case studies. It suggests the complex meanings of world images through concrete analyses of projects that range from the representation of the human community as one “family” to encounters with nonhuman life in the deepest recesses of the oceans, from world’s fairs and microcinemas, to the creation of planetary archives based on one man’s life. These projects represent a nuanced range of world-building projects in the period after World War II.

Each of the projects I discuss is utopian. The conceptualization of utopia in this book is plural and process-oriented, and owes much to the work of the Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim. His definition of “utopia” as a spatial but historically grounded projection is no doubt related to his own experience of exile from Hungary to Germany, where he wrote Ideology and Utopia. Certainly, as opposed to Karl Popper, who saw the darker totalitarian side of utopia as strictures imposed on people from above, Mannheim recognized the importance of utopianism in the creation of historically conscious citizens. A utopian mentality helps to situate the world in space and time—it opens up the sphere of possibility to include the impossible. “The disappearance of utopia brings about a state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing,” Mannheim argued.⁴

Ecstatic Worlds poses the question: Do we live in one world or many? It answers this question by examining how photography, film, video, and digital media have been used to imagine and record the world as common ground and collaborative entanglement. More specifically, I look at how these media have fostered forms of participatory spectatorship, public spaces, and collective simultaneities. The book is divided into three parts—“Earth,” “Worlds,” and “Planet”—each of which offers contiguous and overlapping postwar histories of world image projects. These projects present a sense of earth as a shared ecology (Edward Steichen and Jacques Cousteau), of multiple worlds (the Festival of Britain, Expo 67), and of the planet (Mobile Cinemas and Planetary Archives). Pivotal to these explorations are debates about anthropocentrism, ontology, plurality, universality, history, sustainability, and (post/trans) humanism. These questions are grounded in the phenomenological thinking and media theories of Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin, Alfred North Whitehead, Jakob von Uexküll, Patrick Geddes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, Buckminster Fuller, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Catherine Malabou, Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, and Mary Louise Pratt. These scientists, critics, and philosophers, as well as the exhibitions, films, and media examined here, provide a rich canvas through which to consider aspirations to forms of worlding, both as ideal and as empirical actualities that enable new kinds of political assemblies.

The notion of the common necessarily involves translation as a crucial aspect of communication, and it is central, both as process and as problem, to all the world-building projects studied in this book. As Zygmunt Bauman maintains, translation is the fundamental issue of the global age.⁵ Étienne Balibar builds on Bauman’s ideas by foregrounding a new understanding of translation as a daily practice that enables us to reconceptualize a community of citizens.⁶ Ecstatic Worlds locates the idea of translation within the realm of photographic and digital images. It engages with the differences and integral relationships between words and images in terms of how they function as language. This book is not a survey of world projects but rather situates itself within a history of a desire to create world images, like Albert Khan’s Archives de la planète or the theoretically and aesthetically rich, translocal and global web projects initiated by curator Steve Dietz.⁷ Though these are not examined in the book, they represent the opposite poles of the book’s reach, from traditional analog photography to digital media platforms, and from a banker’s aspiration to create a shared archive of world images to a program of artists creating interactive works on digital media platforms in the early years of web art.

Each chapter of Ecstatic Worlds concentrates on a specific medium while engaging a comparative-media methodology within the context of expanded media studies. One of my aims is to develop a series of historically grounded studies (portraits or exhibits) of individuals, groups, and interconnected contexts involved in world-visioning projects, technologies, and festivals, several of which are not part of any official histories. This approach allows me to provide close readings of theoretical and philosophical ideas, especially around phenomenology, alongside an examination of particular artistic engagements with media technologies, all the while maintaining a technological materiality that is never subsumed by theory. My study examines the cultures that arose immediately after the Second World War that engaged with aspects of globalization, technological innovation, popular culture, and artistic experimentation as a means to build world communities through the power of media or media events. This historical situatedness provides insight into the shifting geopolitical meanings of world images and the historical basis of liberal humanist ideas about technology in specific places over a fifty-year timespan.

Another aim of this book is to draw attention to the singular and collective contributions of the artists and thinkers examined herein. While the efforts of Edward Steichen and Jacques Cousteau are well known, they are often reduced to Cold War media; and in fact, there has been no serious examination of Cousteau’s work. The placement of Steichen and Cousteau side by side in part I enables certain insights into their commonalities and their differences. I read their work dialectically and underscore the fact that each was complicit in national and imperial projects in the United States and France in the mid-1950s, and that their work circulated through the new global culture networks that were a product of World War II. The collaborative undertakings of others in this book, however, are still not well understood (or else remain unknown: for example, Humphrey Jennings, Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Wells Coates, Roman Kroitor and Colin Low, Graham Stevens, Martin Heath, and others). Many of these creators and writers were involved in some way with Montreal’s international world’s fair, Expo 67, which serves as a historical centerpiece for the book. The two chapters in part II stand as a before-and-after to Expo 67, although as I discuss below, this book is not strictly chronological and works to trace overlapping histories, allowing for different perspectives on one moment in history.

These two approaches—the historical and the individual—contribute to our understandings of the twentieth century’s technological humanism as it emerged in England, France, the United States, Canada, and Finland after the Second World War. This limited focus on these particular countries allows me to get at details of technological humanism, approaches to the phenomenology of media, and notions of common culture, which are all too often presented in a caricatured form as a simplistic liberal humanism. To be sure, technological humanism receives expression in neologisms such as the “global village” and the “global theatre” popularized by McLuhan in the 1950s and 1960s—and Expo 67 was dubbed “McLuhan’s fair.” But for McLuhan, the global village reproduced village-like conditions complete with violent clashes, paranoia, and vicious exchanges. The global village is not a peaceful place. Nevertheless, this idea, like Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” articulated earlier in the century, is without doubt utopian and deeply humanistic in its aspiration. It carries with it the potential for a common experience through the senses. For McLuhan, this is a human-centered endeavor, but for some of the writers and artists in this book, the aspiration includes the broader ecological mandate that Merleau-Ponty explored through his notions of “chiasm” and “flesh” developed in his posthumously published book The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty and Bataille were working with highly scientific notions of the biosphere. Similarly, Whitehead’s valuation of the critical role played by “aesthetic apprehension” emphasizes the “aesthetic character of experience” (a large influence on Siegfried Kracauer, Merleau-Ponty, and McLuhan). As Whitehead tells us, “When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you still miss the radiance of the sunset.” Whitehead was interested in art as a training ground for sensory perception: “Art is a special example … to draw out habits of aesthetic apprehension.”⁸

The limits of secular humanism are visible as scars on many bodies, as Mary Louise Pratt has underlined: “Among humanism’s most conspicuous and intractable limits are the structures of otherness without which modernity remains indecipherable to itself. These realize themselves in familiar hierarchies of privilege and inequality, and in continuous claims for inclusion.”⁹ Yet Pratt also suggests appropriating the term and finding a novel discursive affordance to build a vital common culture to address the ecological challenges that are upon us.

One of the things that artists do is to visualize possible futures and develop blueprints for unforeseen structures and expanded modes of being together. This book is about new ecological approaches to cinema and media, the reimagining of interfaces, and the exploration of the natural world—“elemental media,” to borrow John Durham Peters’s terminology¹⁰—which were defined by new geopolitical and ideological missions in the postwar period. The projects explored in Ecstatic Worlds can be framed in terms of their expansion of cinema and media, as well as their ambitions to increase audience participation and the interface between media and environment. Some of the ecological ideas that artists/architects drew upon were developed through town planners such as Patrick Geddes or architects like Buckminster Fuller who inspired generations.

Ideas about future politics and collective affects, the creation of new forms of sensibility and empathy through art, are taken up in the final part of this book, which engages with the planetary and the concepts of archives, time capsules, and space travel. I draw my definition of the planetary from Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s manifesto for “Planetary Urbanization” where they argue that urban studies requires a foundational reconceptualization in its scale and focus:

Brenner and Schmid seek to expand the boundaries of the urban to include processes of urbanization beyond the limitations of “the city,” to broaden the object of analysis to a much greater and more flexible scale. Similarly, Ecstatic Worlds seeks to expand the boundaries of cinema and media studies to take the materiality and ecology of the earth into account. In this sense, the book belongs to growing research in the area of ecomedia.¹² In its examination of a variety of films (still and moving) and media exhibitions, installations, and interventions, this book is indebted to Anne Friedberg’s extensive interdisciplinary discussion of the architectonics of screens in The Virtual Window (2006).¹³ In her final chapter on “The Multiple,” Friedberg provides an overview of multiscreen experiments in which she discusses some of the Expo 67 projects that I also take up here. Ecstatic Worlds also builds productively on Fred Turner’s two highly original investigations, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) and The Democratic Surround (2013), which form an interconnected history.¹⁴ The first book offers a detailed account of Stewart Brand’s cultural influence in the context of American Cold War ideology, experimental art, and capitalist media, while the second examines a time prior to that, of American liberalism’s more radical social, democratic, and aesthetic vision of the 1940s and 50s expressed through institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Turner provides a unique cultural history of democracy and media which is critical to Ecstatic Worlds’ engagement with a history of twentieth-century media.

Nigel Clark points out in Inhuman Nature (2011) that the earth sciences, long ignored by the humanities and social sciences, are moving center stage to underscore and create new dynamic cartographies of the biosphere, and this is a direct and urgent response to our planetary crisis. The new discourses of global nature need to make room, Clark argues, for a relational materiality and for a geophysical materiality with an integrity of its own.¹⁵ Ecstatic Worlds seeks to understand what this geophysical materiality looks like across a diversity of media productions. While the focus of the book is mostly on historical projects that grow out of the post-World War II context, the artist projects examined in the final chapter of this book share some similar utopian sensibilities in that they approach the planetary with an emphasis on the particularities of localized experiences. All three of these projects were “launched” after 2012: the satellite time capsule The Last Pictures; the site A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, an open archive of objects and statements from people around the planet; and the multimedia project World of Matter, initiated in 2013 as an open-access archive on the global ecologies of resource exploitation and circulation.

Ecstatic Worlds

This book is concerned not only with the “world as picture” as the “fundamental event of modernity,” as Martin Heidegger phrased it in 1938,¹⁶ but also with the particular ontologies of photographic and digital images of the world. Most people live in and through a dynamic ecology of intermedia, which are of the world and render the world legible in particular ways. I understand images as environmental—we live in a world drenched in dynamic ecologies of discontinuous and discrete images, a mosaic of fragments that interact with one another as assemblages, and that augment physical and virtual environments. Images are ubiquitous, yet we hold them dear; they are anonymous, yet they are also shocking and we take them personally. They create forms of empathy that are disconnected from action. This apparent contradictoriness highlights a phenomenological dimension that necessarily accompanies any ecological approach to studying media. Not simply visual, images offer auditory and tactile experiences as well—they are acoustic and intricately bound up with embodied experience, with others and with places. While they can take us out of ourselves, they also affect our bodies. In other words, media are not discrete objects or products of single artists; they are deeply embedded in the cultural fabric from which they emerge, in which they are performed, screened, and consumed.

My understanding of ecstatic worlds begins with Georges Bataille. His reflections on eroticism, sacrifice, and ecstasy, and his notion of expenditure resonate deeply in the twenty-first century. From his editorship of the surrealist periodical Documents (1929–1931) to his last book, The Tears of Eros (1961), he sought to understand the affective relationship between images and bodies. For him, everything begins and ends with laughter; laughter is a central interest. Indeed, laughter provides the bridge between the short period of devout Catholicism in his life to his most profound criticisms of Christianity and his theory of religion via Nietzsche. For Bataille, laughter has many faces: “When all is said and done, I have more than one face. I don’t know which is laughing at which.”¹⁷ Indeed, laughter is fundamentally a matter of different kinds of communication, and Bataille distinguishes between two experiences of laughter. The first is a communication “linking up two beings.” A mother tickling her child, for example, elicits ordinary, unmediated laughter. The second is a “communication, through death, with our beyond.” This is what Bataille identifies as “infinite laughter,” a communication with “our beyond … (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is: what can’t be grasped [begreift] in any way, what we can’t reach without dissolving overselves, what’s slavishly called God).” This can also remain “in an undefined state (in ordinary laughter, infinite laughter, or ecstasy in which the divine form melts like sugar in water).”¹⁸

According to Bataille, communication takes place between the poles of ecstasy and community, with each giving rise to and constituting the limit of the other. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy locates what is original in Bataille’s concept of community in the erasure of community—the notion that community is founded on disappearance and the impossible: “Bataille is without doubt the one who experiences, most acutely, the modern experience of community as neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.”¹⁹ Being, for both Bataille and Nancy, is “being with.” As Nancy expresses it, “you (are/and/is) (entirely other than) I” (toi [e(s)t] [tout autre que] moi). Or again, more simply, “you shares me.” This tension—a sharing that is always incomplete and dislocated—drives communication; it is the creation of the “between,” not as “juxtaposition, but as exposition,” that rejects any simple notion of “intersubjectivity” or communication as “bond.”²⁰ This “unemployed community” or “inoperative [désoeuvré] community” offers new models for thinking about the world as a plural community made up of people who have little in common.

Indeed, in his prefatory note to the English edition of The Creation of the World, Nancy remarks that there is no translation for mondialisation, which came into usage in French after the Second World War and “evokes an expanding process throughout the expanse of the world of human beings, cultures and nations.”²¹ Thus, mondialisation is expressed in English as “world forming”; it is “the horizon of a ‘world’ as a space of possible meaning for the whole of human relations.” It is a conceptualization of the world that is not simply open but, as this book will show, includes the idea of an outside, which, as Nancy has explained, is “exteriority and contingency”; it is “a ‘nature’ that is ‘outside’ us, to which we are exposed and without which our exposition would not take place.”²² By contrast, globalization has a very linear direction (sens): it is an “enclosure in the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality.”²³ Globalization is a reduction of the world to the technological and economic, it is the “unworld” (immonde) that translates the world into a global idiom or representation in Heidegger’s sense of the “world as picture.” Globalization, once the universalizing project of the West, has been subsumed into a capitalization of the world where the relativity of norms and values cannot be judged.²⁴ It is here that we come to the end of the world, Nancy argues: “In the end, everything takes place as if the world affected and permeated itself with a death drive that soon would have nothing else to destroy than the world itself. … The fact that the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis: it is in a sense the fact from which any thinking of the world follows, to the point, however, that we do not exactly know what ‘to destroy’ means, nor which world is destroying itself.”²⁵ Yet it is at this precise juncture that the possibility of rethinking the world, of questioning, emerges: “[W]e must ask anew what the world wants of us, and what we want of it, everywhere, in all senses, urbi et orbi, all over the world and for the whole world, without (the) capital of the world but with the richness of the world.”²⁶ While opposed, these two modalities—mondialisation and globalization—are not opposites and, indeed, as we will see in Ecstatic Worlds, they are often deeply interconnected.

Nancy thus proposes a way of thinking through the diversity that singularly constitutes the relations of humankind. Central to this idea is the recognition of the “outside,” which, as Nancy puts it, means “the outside-of-self.” This notion is at the core of what I take to be the ecstatic world—a concept inspired by Bataillean ecology—not the world in which we live, but a world that is present as potentiality. Finally, then, this study is framed by the radical ontology Nancy proposes in Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural), which argues that being is always a question of “being with,” thus breaking down the opposition between the one and the many.

Part I: Earth

The world projects examined in Ecstatic Worlds are informed, in various ways, by the tension Nancy locates between globalization and mondialisation, between the end of the world and the creation of the world. They came into being in contexts created by World War II (though World War I is also important to this incarnation), with the new destructive capacity of the atom bomb and the extensive reach of communications technologies (in particular, radar and sonar) that enable control at a distance. Satellite technology, too, was a product of the militarism of World War II. Postwar geopolitics shattered the world into pieces just as it rendered that world and its oceans increasingly visible through technology. Boundaries broke down here and were erected there. Earth appeared to be both smaller and more fragmented, conceptualized and experienced as integrally tied to human existence and yet separate from it. Such images of the world do not come into being out of nowhere through technology but are inextricably tied up in ideologies and preexisting belief systems. Denis Cosgrove has traced the long history of Western images of the globe:

From the joint inheritance of Aristotelian humanism, Alexandrian and Augustan imperialism, and Judeo-Christian monotheism the West has forged a flexible but deeply resistant sense of the missionary telos: to redeem the world ad termini orbis terrarum. … In projecting ideas and beliefs forged in one locale across global space, the liberal mission of universal redemption is inescapably ethnocentric and imperial, able to admit “other” voices only if they speak and are spoken by the language of the (self-denying) center. Desire for a perfect, universal language has been a persistent companion of Western globalism.²⁷

Ecstatic Worlds explores this desire for a universal language by focusing on the utopian discourse of universal communication that underpins the history of writing about photography and cinema. The first section of Ecstatic Worlds is devoted to the notion of “Earth,” terrestrial earth, which exists both above and below the oceans, as visualized in popular media after World War II. The first two chapters are concerned with the use of photography and film as language that encompasses all languages enabling communication and connection. We can locate this notion in early accounts and debates about the artistic merits of photography. We also find it in realist paradigms in film history—in Siegfried Kracauer’s writings and in André Bazin’s criticism, particularly—where film does not simply represent but also translates the world to the world, creating an intersubjective and intercultural sphere. Ecstatic Worlds explores cinematic ontology and phenomenology in terms of the concept of communication in all its complexity and ideology, in its capacity to create connections between people and in its ability to create community through forms of perception and representation.

The two projects considered in part I are Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man” and Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s monumental underwater film Le monde du silence (The Silent World), completed in 1956. Both are expressions of the complex interaction between mondialisation and globalization, the United States and France, after the Second World War, articulated through the very contradiction at the core of capitalism—to create and to incorporate the outside. Both undertakings give us a view of the social world of the human and the biological world of nature beyond the human.

Chapter 1 examines Siegfried Kracauer’s reading of Steichen’s photographic exhibition in terms of how it offered a future direction for photographic media, making visible “the elementary things which men in general have in common.”²⁸ Both Steichen’s exhibition and Kracauer’s reading of it might well have been influenced by their experiences of the war. A shared fear of catastrophe is reflected in the central image of the “Family of Man” exhibition, a color photograph (the only color photograph in the exhibition) of an atomic explosion. Unquestionably, the threat contained in this image—and its reality—drove Steichen to create an exhibition that, through hundreds of photographs, framed the earth as a human community. This image is central to my reading of the exhibition, along with Steichen’s more ecological and biospheric engagements with art that we see in his 1936 exhibition “Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as well as in his earlier engagements with photography, ecology, and natural forms of processing images. It is perhaps not surprising that Steichen’s humanist exhibition has received more favorable readings in the twenty-first century, reevaluated for its democratic potential²⁹ and its ontological and universalist aspirations at a time when there is a need to seriously rethink our global connectivity. “The Family of Man” has been read both as an expression of the United States’ new power and position in the world and as an attempt to combat the threat of communism by promoting a vision of American openness and of consumer culture as embracing the cultural diversity of the world.

Like Edward Steichen, Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a naval officer in World War II. Both were “captains,” and both insisted on this appellation throughout their respective careers. Both also developed pioneering photographic technologies that served new forms of militaristic surveillance—aerial in Steichen’s case and underwater in Cousteau’s. Yet unlike Steichen, who went on to use photography with the intention of uniting the peoples of the world in a single human community (and thus making the world smaller), Cousteau was intent on opening up another world—the ocean—an invisible ecology that he would explore in more than 120 films and television programs as well as 50 popular books over his long career. Cousteau’s films contributed to the popular imaginary at a time when consumers of popular media, in North America and Western Europe especially, were “hungry” for images of and stories about the sea. This was also a time when governments were expanding their sovereign powers over the ocean floor (revising the longstanding law of the seas), and capitalizing upon previously hidden resources. Chapter 2 considers the way in which Cousteau’s expeditions in the 1940s and 1950s made the Mediterranean visible and wondrous. At least part of the wonder that Cousteau and Malle’s film The Silent World generated, I argue, was due to a combination of advanced technology (Cousteau’s boat, Calypso, equipped with both radar and sonar, was a technologically advanced movie studio and scientific lab) and Cousteau’s persona, split between the more militaristic “Captain” and the hybrid futuristic “l’homme poisson.” The latter figure (a being at one with the ocean and its inhabitants), which helped to mediate new, never-before-seen cinematic images beneath the ocean, accounts for the affective and phenomenological aspects of his films. I argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, which he developed in his working notes for The Visible and Invisible, contributes to aesthetic and ecological interpretations of the experience of the film. Merleau-Ponty, in turn, was influenced by Jakob von Uexküll’s work on umwelts, the subjective perceptual worlds of humans and nonhuman animals that help to concretize Nancy’s concept of the “singular plural.”

I argue, then, that “The Family of Man,” when read as foregrounding human solidarity in the face of a common danger (the atom bomb), can be understood more broadly in terms of a postwar brand of humanism and specifically in relation to Steichen’s pacifist desires. On the other hand, Cousteau’s underwater films present an entirely different response to the war and its aftermath. They can be read as a naïve yearning to escape the horrors of the war and the military occupation of France, and as expressing a humanistic and phenomenological commitment to the planet’s oceans through the popular culture of cinema. They can be seen as expressions of France’s imperialistic ventures into unexplored territory, and as a quest for control of untapped resources in the context of a decolonizing world.

Steichen and Cousteau shared a common view of how media (photography, film, and television) could enable a popular type of environmental pedagogy and facilitate forms of global community and solidarity by representing previously hidden relationships and bonds. In this sense, and despite the differences between their projects, both Steichen and Cousteau augment our perceptions of the planet through their emphasis on limits (Steichen’s apocalyptic vision of the end of the world) and expansion (Cousteau’s underwater films). Each created specific kinds of mobile interfaces (the photographic exhibition and the undersea documentary) that traveled around the world and consolidated a global audience.

Part II: Worlds

The story of whose imagining of the world makes it into World History is inextricably bound not only to empire and imperialism but also to the history of representation. The world projects implicit in Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” and Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s underwater films can be seen as responses to the Second World War as well as to major geopolitical shifts in world power. One of the biggest shifts visible after the war was the status of the British Empire, which went from controlling a quarter of the world’s population and land-ocean mass at the end of the nineteenth century to a crumbling nation by the mid-twentieth. This shift in power had begun several decades before the war. Charles P. Kindleberger has argued that “the Great Depression of the 1930s was a consequence of the global shift in power from Britain to the United States, one that left Britain incapable of managing the world economy and an inexperienced United States unwilling to do so.”³⁰ After the war, however, the United States was more ready to assume such a role. The Marshall Plan (1948), officially designated the European Recovery Program (ERP), was crafted by US Secretary of State George Marshall in order to restore and rebuild the national economies of the war-ravaged nations of Europe. In so doing, the program helped to secure the postwar dominance of the United States over world markets.

Part II is devoted to “Worlds” in the plural. It takes its cue from Uexküll’s umwelt theory to focus on smaller utopian projects and events—The Festival of Britain and Expo 67—examining the design and cultural architectonics of their utopian articulations, each of which constitutes, in effect, a space of projection into the future. The design and cultural topographies of these two national undertakings embody the world-making energies of the postwar period in the building, respectively, of nations (Festival of Britain and the Telekinema), and world cities (Expo 67 and Labyrinth).

Chapter 3 is devoted to the future visions presented at the Festival of Britain. The notion of the one and the many, or Jean-Luc Nancy’s “singular plural,” lies at the heart of the new approaches to urban planning on display at the Festival’s “Live Architecture Exhibition,” which town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt participated in designing and overseeing. This exhibition was a public demonstration of town planning and building techniques in the context of recovery—it included entire neighborhoods in the process of reconstruction, along with information about the choices that planners and architects were making and opportunities for public discussion. Elsewhere, the Festival’s approach to cultural inclusiveness and public culture was also visible in the extraordinary Telekinema designed by architect Wells Coates, which combined live television projection and 3D cinema. This combination of television and 3D film helped to frame the performative (the liveness) and future-oriented aspects of a national fair deeply engaged with processes of postwar globalization; these processes included an approach to planning that ran counter to the Athens Charter,³¹ inspired instead by the ecological urban theories of the Scottish-born Patrick Geddes—a concern for people and nature rather than mere functionality. Furthermore, Mannheim’s sociology and utopian energies had an important influence on British town planning as well as on the work of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS)—the British wing of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM)—which Tyrwhitt was involved in developing as both a teacher and a planner.

Chapter 4 expands on many of the themes introduced by the Festival of Britain’s emphasis on urban planning and media, developed further at Montreal’s Expo 67. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt worked with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto from 1952 through 1955 with the Explorations Group—an interdisciplinary think tank dedicated to understanding the spatiotemporal effects of media—and we can see the important influence of contemporary approaches to architecture and urban media on both the Festival of Britain and Expo 67’s media city. This influence is only one of the numerous cultural resonances between the two expositions. Norman McLaren was the head of the animation department at the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada when he was invited to produce two 3D films for the Telekinema. McLaren hired Colin Low as an intern at the NFB in 1945 and served as his lifelong mentor. While Low did not work on the Festival of Britain films, he was deeply influenced by McLaren’s love of 3D. I examine McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s two films produced for the festival, and I also look at the multiscreen immersive film Labyrinth produced by Low and Roman Kroitor for Expo 67. All of these films were aimed at creating ecstatic sensations in viewers who experienced the singular and collective haptic effects of 3D and multiscreen cinema.

Part III: Planet

The final section of the book focuses on two spaces, a microcinema and an archive, that exist within gift economies. CineCycle, an alternative microcinema and bicycle repair shop, and a vital venue for experimental film and media since 1991 in the city of Toronto, is the subject of chapter 6. Here I trace the career of Martin Heath, the British projectionist, film collector, and CineCycle owner, who helped to design a film theater for the Russian Pavilion at Expo 67 while he worked for the radical film distributor Charles Cooper. Heath was part of a lively film community in London in the 1960s; then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked with pneumatic artist Graham Stevens to create new inflatable cinemas. CineCycle has helped to create a form of what I call “resistant obsolescence” in the context of perpetual technological change. Its commitment to low-end technologies and a variety of film and video formats has encouraged an alternative cultural economy of temporary events (festivals, dinners, exhibitions, performances), which can be traced through a multiplicity of cultural networks across North America, as well as parts of Europe and Asia. These types of gatherings are part of what Allan Stoekl has called the “postsustainable economy.”³² This economy appeared with the oil crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s and is situated within contexts of energy use and depletion.

In addition to CineCycle, chapter 6 discusses Agnès Varda’s film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). Both CineCycle and Varda’s film materialize acts of collecting, recycling, and circulating, as well as the concept of an ecology of images in the context of a capitalist technocratic economy. The themes of aging, waste, and recycling are framed here by Bataille’s theory of expenditure as developed in The Accursed Share. Written under the influence of Vernadsky in the 1940s, Bataille called for a transformation of the ethics upon which capitalist economies have been built, and for a shift from a restrictive economy (i.e., an economy based on scarcity) to a general economy or one of exuberant gifting. Bataille reminds us that economic growth cannot be praised without considering the effects of production on the very surface of the earth. He encourages us to think “at the scale of the universe.”³³ As Nigel Clark suggests, “We might have a better chance of prising the planet out of its downward ecological spiral, accidently, not as the goal of a grand visionary project but as the unintended consequence of more joyous and generous living right here and now.”³⁴ CineCyle is a work of love, hospitality, and gifting. This is in line with Donna Haraway’s joyous exhortation to think and create together, both humans and nonhumans, in “collaborative entanglements” across the new knowledge ecologies and materialities of the geologic.

The final chapter of part III examines the planetary ambitions of Buckminster Fuller to create a World Game—the geoscope—in which winning means making the planet work for everyone by rationalizing resources and distributing them so that everyone can live luxuriously. While never built, the geoscope represents one of the most utopian projections of the planet. The American collective Ant Farm, a group of architects deeply influenced by Fuller’s ecological vision and McLuhan’s approach to media ecology, devised a transspecies communication platform—the Dolphin Embassy. Their proposal for this research laboratory in the ocean that allows cetaceans and humans to study each other using video technology, helps to shift the planetary perspective away from a human-centered vision and toward a shared world. The chapter goes on to examine Finnish artist and scientist Erkki Kurenniemi’s “Death of the Planet” project—a universal archive and planetary museum inspired by the transhumanism of Ray Kurzweil. Kurenniemi is constructing an archive of his entire life, which he intends to be (re)played by a future generation on Mars in 2048. He firmly believes that mathematics will provide a new universal language and that, in the not-too-distant future when humans have destroyed the earth, human consciousness will be stored in computers on another planet. This chapter explores the distinctions between humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism in the context of intelligent machines. Critical of Kurzweil and transhuman discourse, I situate Kurenniemi’s archival project alongside the postanthropocentric ecologies of Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. I also consider new formulations of the digital archive as generative and “transtemporal” within a gift economy.

Kurenniemi’s archive and Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy extend the experiments with media that I contemplate in Ecstatic Worlds: from Steichen’s “Family of Man” to Cousteau’s underwater films, from world’s fairs to Heath’s microcinema—each represents an engagement with a different conception of connectivity and collectivity through media that can be seen as belonging to the prehistory of the Internet. Ecstatic Worlds maintains the need to shift our foundational conceptualizations of worlds to include the physical planet we inhabit collectively despite being differently located. The book seeks to rethink through each project the potential relationship between environment and media, to consider a media ecology by way of Uexküll’s notion of umwelts, Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of flesh, Whitehead’s notion of the aesthetic, and Bataille’s general economy. I argue that a new brand of humanism, global rather than universal, is needed to support the new forms of ecological consciousness that the Anthropocene calls for. Donna Haraway enjoins us to “think” in the face of the ecological crisis of the present world. The utopian architectures that Ecstatic Worlds brings together allow us to do just that, to reimagine a future way of being together going forward.

Notes

12. Some recent books on ecomedia include: Sean Cubitt, EcoMedia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Anders Hansen, Environment, Media and Communication (London: Routledge, 2010); Antonio Lopez, Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship (New York: Peter Lang, 2014); Libby Lester, Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, eds., Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2016); Rayson K. Alex and S. Susan Deborah, eds., Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds., Ecomedia: Key Issues (London: Routledge, 2016).