The Digital Ecologies 3 Symposium examines the complex material relationship between technology, society, food and energy production and the land. It is informed by Yuk Hui’s notion that the essence of contemporary technology is to ‘consider everything as a standing reserve, as a resource to be ordered and exploited’. Along these lines Hito Steyerl identifies AI generative media as ‘Mean Images’ and looks at their reliance on ‘vast infrastructures of polluting hardware and menial and disenfranchised labour’. 

We must scrutinise the material and ecological cost of production, extraction, AI and technological acts, and seek to reimagine our relationship with technology, not as a tool for exploitation, but as a means of seeing things differently and fostering care and attention towards all entities.