Media Mapping and Oil Extraction: A Louisiana Story

The proposed article is part of a larger project to investigate the history and presence of situated or geolocational media and the fundamental roles these media play in constituting—for good and ill—the environments where they have been installed or over which they have hovered. Influenced by emerging scholarship in ecomedia and spatial media studies, human geography and GIScience, and critical environmental justice, the project understands documentary film as a map and as a navigational technology kin to other mapping technologies that mark, measure, scan, model, fossilize and, in this way, anticipate and bring into being the environments they may seem only to record with their saccadic vision. How do geolocational media figure environments at risk? How do they figure into them? To begin to answer these questions, and in the spirit of mapping as generative, the project presses toward a cartographically-attuned heuristic that is historical, positional, and committed to understanding how people, places, and media become articulate relationally.