In this paper, I examine how in Beyond the Blue: Kuroshio’s Voyage Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi addresses technologies that (re-)mediate the darkness of the sea and transform humans’ relationship with the latter. Beyond the Blue is a collection of sea journals kept by Wu together with Hui-chung Chang and Kuan-Long Chen when they voyage around Taiwan on the ship Turumoan, though about two-thirds of the diaries are written by Wu. This work records the three’s thoughts and observations during the journey, an excursion serving as both a scientific investigation into the human detriment to the island’s near coast ecology and an opportunity allowing the passengers to learn how, in Wu’s words, “to get along with the sea.” The latter goal is enabled by several technological devices that (re-)mediate the sea darkness, as illustrated by the various media referred to in Beyond the Blue, including the vehicle that carries Wu and others around, the instruments employed to measure the percentages of dissolved-oxygen saturation and microplastics in different near-coastal ocean regions of Taiwan, and the poetic language Wu adopts to depict the sea water. Notably, these technologies are not adopted to render the sea an object of conquest or comprehension or to romanticize it as what remains pristine and bears no human footprint. Rather, they function as the very means by which the human travelers come to encounter the sea, primarily as what they barely understand or know how to grapple with. With these contrivances, the passengers on Turumoan are exposed to what is dark to them, to what is ungraspable to them and what causes anxiety and discomfort to them, be this “what” associated with the sea waves, the sea waste, or the sea as such. More importantly, these dark experiences occur over and again, triggering the sea change of these travelers—they finally know how to get along with the sea, not by overcoming or recovering from the dark feelings it arouses but by adapting to and even adopting them. In the meantime, an alternative interaction with the sea arises: no longer perceiving it as what is exploitable and inconsequential, those coming across the darkness pertaining to the sea come to consider their impact on the latter and alter how they treat it. Put differently, Beyond the Blue stages the (re-)mediation of darkness in a double manner: it re-mediates or transcribes recurrently the dark emotions brought about by the sea and stresses the significance of remediating or modifying the way human beings approach the latter. My purpose here is to analyze the technologies Wu conceives of in his journals respecting this twofold (re-)mediation. I first review the nature of the darkness at issue in my paper in light of Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology. Then, I discuss how the diverse technological devices or what I prefer to name “dark media”—the ship, the body, the sampling apparatus, or the sea waste—articulated in Beyond the Blue (re-)mediate the human-sea relationship. Afterwards, I draw attention to Wu’s understanding of the way humans can get along with the sea both in tandem and in contrast with Morton’s thoughts on this matter.

Taking contemporary feminist literary film adaptations as the research object, this paper applies theories of comparative literature and world literature to explore the reconstruction of feminism in cross-media narratives. Through analysing a number of film adaptations, it reveals the dimensions of women's emotional mobility, family relationships, and ethical views, and shows women's self-awakening and identity construction in modern society. Taking My Altair as an example, the film explores women's changing roles in family and society, as well as their defence of the basic rights to survival and life. This paper deconstructs women's rebellion against patriarchal space in the film adaptation, reconstructs social space, suspends the disorder of historical space with artistic vision, concerns the reproduction of heterogeneous space in the spatialisation of the female subject, provides a new perspective for understanding the film adaptation of feminist literature, and looks forward to the development trend of feminism in the future.

In recent years critical scholarships in the field of biopolitics or biopower have developed towards a recategorisation of the unattended forms of social life, reconceptualising the materiality and vulnerability of the lifeless in the changing social spacings of the Anthropocene. Through posing new, other wise kinds of analytics which disrupt the dominant binary between Life and Death, scholars have theorised around the redistribution of affect, in an attempt to tend to the slow, ordinary forms of violence which inhabit the lived spaces of the human and nonhuman. In particular, Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) poses three figures of geontopower (the maintenance of difference between Life and Nonlife) – the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus – as indicatives of the otherwise within late liberalism, which harbour the potential to enlighten an alternative form of governmentality.

Parallel to this, recent publications within multiple realms of artistic practices have addressed the increasing sense of urgency towards manifold environmental crises and geopolitical traumas, participating in the reinvention of the inert or inorganic, offering new, imaginative ways of survival and endurance. This research will contribute to the ongoing debates which explore the interaction between art and the plurality of “life worlds” (Biehl and Locke, 2017), responding to queries posing whether alternative theoretical approaches or glossaries are able – or not – to illuminate the precarious realities of entangled existences.

Moving beyond the museum or gallery space, I will examine the public spheres animated through site-specific video installations, here conceptualised as disruptive interventions which may reimagine certain moments or conditions of existence, thus opening alternative spaces and orderings wherein new arrangements of life forms may persevere. I will analyse the functionality of digital media and technologies in relevance to site-specificity, following the notion of site-specificity as “writing over the city, as palimpsest” which “decode[s] and/or recode[s] the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden operations”, posing the projections as new, digital layers added to the earthly fabric of shared spaces within society, therein creating dispersed spatial platforms attuned to the constitution of multiple temporalities.

This paper explores Jean Epstein’s early experimental and theoretical writings on modernist poetry alongside his later writings on film that articulate film as a nonhuman intelligence and an ancestral form of artificial intelligence.

Poetry serves as both a moving target of emulation and a litmus test of humanlike intelligence for large language models like ChatGPT. The emergence of AI-written poems conjures an existential fear as they signify a nonhuman encroachment into not only logos, a uniquely human realm of language, but also poetry, its most capacious and revealing form. Recent studies show that readers find AI-generated poetry to be virtually indistinguishable to those written by humans, if not more favorable. In response, philosopher Yuk Hui points out that to consider the goal of AI as imitating human beings is a product of a long-lived and problematic understanding of technology as defined by industrialization and consumerism, whereby technical objects are only imagined as functional replacements to human labor and creativity rather than prosthetic aids to them.

How can we articulate a new relationship between humans and technical objects that is rooted not in the threat of replacement but in open imagination? This paper attempts to outline one possible answer by turning to the work of Jean Epstein. I bring together three areas of scholarship on Epstein’s writings on literature and film. First, I examine how Epstein’s theorization of modernist poetry has been considered as one heavily imprinted and transformed by cinema. Second, I examine the contemporary readings of Epstein’s book Intelligence of a Machine as an exposition of film as a form of AI. Christophe Wall-Romana elucidates how Epstein saw that the poetry of early 20th century France centered on sensory experience, which also formed the core of his theory of photogénie as an embodied epistemology of cinema. Christine Reeh Peters points out that Epstein’s later writings show a belief in the cinematograph as a machine capable not of image-production that approaches human impression, but of a uniquely nonhuman perception of the world that exists alongside a human one. I argue that his prescient articulation of machinic intelligence evades the anthropocentric prescription of the human-machine relationship. Lastly, I look at the influence of his work on ecological thought by considering his Breton films in which the ocean and the French littoral life are featured as a prominent motif, and question what it means to consider his films as a quasi-articulation of AI, given the devastating environmental impact of generative AI today.

Ultimately, I suggest that Epstein’s philosophy of literature and of cinema is simultaneously a philosophy of machinic thinking, and that it can helps us ground our own relationship to AI and technical objects at large not in post-apocalyptic fear of robot revolt but instead in the full imaginative capacities of human thought.