CALL FOR PAPERS
THE VISUAL POLITICS OF DIGITAL ECOLOGIES
A Digital Ecologies Conference: February 2nd – 3rd 2026, University of Oxford
As environmental degradation accelerates apace globally, Nature is becoming increasingly mediated through screens, sensors, and simulations: datafied, downloaded, and deciphered; saved, stored, and shared. Emerging technologies create novel visual regimes through which humans encounter, imagine, and interpret the other-than-human world. These visual regimes are not only technical; they also refashion ecological aesthetics, shaping how environments are perceived, valued, and cared for. Wildlife webcams promise unmediated intimacy with living beings, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) fabricates hallucinatory ecologies untethered from the web of life. “Digital twins” offer ecosystems from an impossible nowhere-everywhere vantage (a rearticulated ‘god trick’), while Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies layer and curate space and attention at the whim of their designers. From TikTok feeds to satellite imagery, these proliferating techniques of visualisaiton not only mediate ecological knowledge but also stage new aesthetic and political relations between humans and their environments.
Visualisation practices—often employed uncritically or devoid of social, cultural, and historical context—form a key part of emergent forms of modelling, prediction, and analysis in science, engineering, and architecture. Emergent visualisation practices are not neutral; they carry material, affective, and political implications for increasingly precarious ecologies. The implications of these practices, therefore, fundamentally alter the politics of environmental governance and knowledge. From the advertising boards of property developers to contemporary documentary film, this emerging visual regime is characterised by, among other things, curation, artificiality, and abundance. What is at stake, then, in this evolving visual politics of ecologies? How might we characterise this emerging visual regime? How is nature visually presented?
This in-person conference invites contributions from academics, artists, and practitioners interested in the visual politics of digital ecologies. We aim to collectively explore visual metaphors prevalent in the mediation of more-than-human worlds to interrogate how digital technologies are refashioning ecological aesthetics. We invite 20-minute papers with one-word titles that speak to a particular action of visualisation, for example: reflecting, hallucinating, refracting, zooming, obscuring, glitching, layering, pixelating, blurring, filtering, operating, mirroring, generating. Following the conference, our intention is to publish a collection detailing this lexicon with one-word chapter titles.
Please send abstracts of up to 250 words along with a short author biography and contact details to adam.searle@nottingham.ac.uk and jonathon.j.turnbull@durham.ac.uk by November 14th.
The two-day conference will take place at the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub, Jesus College, University of Oxford on 2nd and 3rd February, 2026.
We are delighted to welcome Joanna Zylinska (Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice, Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London) and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (Recent recipient of the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize and internationally renowned multimedia artist) as our keynotes.
The event is part of the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub Programme with support from the School of Geography and the Environment and Jesus College Oxford and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
The conference fee will be £59, inclusive of refreshments, lunches, and a networking reception. A number of subsidised tickets may be available. Further details will be published on the conference website soon: digicologies.com
The organising team includes Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, Janina Schupp, Ben Platt, Gillian Rose and the Digital Ecologies Research Group. If you have any questions, please get in touch with one of the organisers.