Aqueous Earth Catalog is an open source, interactive geospatial visualization tool that will accompany my book manuscript. The map is live at aqueous.earth!

Named after the U.S. magazine Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972), whose mission was to inventory tools, methodologies and technologies, and otherwise useful resources in a comprehensive, global scale, the Aqueous Earth Catalog will encourage students and researchers to shift their understanding of the cultures as static and land bound to fluid, dynamic, and interconnected.

In its first iteration, Aqueous Earth Catalog will be a searchable and filterable cartographic database that situates films and videos studied in Aqueous Image on a world map. Please do not hesitate to reach out if:

- you are a fellow researcher, student, web developer, or a specialist in geospatial analysis and want to collaborate, and/or

- you would like to contribute films to be marked on the map. You can also fill out this form.

If you are interested in making a similar map with your own geospatial data, check out the Media Mapper project.

FTV 331 (Film, Media, and Social Justice)
Spring 2024, Loyola Marymount University

Cinema creates worlds: a film illuminates for us physical and social relationships that structure the world and enliven the actors that occupy it. How does the natural environment exist in this world? How does cinema influence our relationship to the planet?

In this course, we investigate how cinematic media privileges, mediates, and even conceals the ecological through film form with political, ethical, ideological, and economic concerns and frameworks. We explore the relationship between moving image media and the environment, investigating how themes like global climate change, extreme weather events, colonialism and environmental racism, ecofeminism, wilderness, animal rights, anthropocentrism, and technology, are explicitly and implicitly expressed through the cinematic image. In addition, this course also examines the material impact of film and media infrastructures on the environment. 

The photo features two of the many films screened in this class: Safe (1995, dir. Haynes) and Behemoth (2015, dir. Liang).