Janine Marchessault

In an article dating from 2007, W. J. T. Mitchell noted that ‘the general tendency has been to talk about the global distribution of images, their circulation in forms of mass media such as cinema, television, advertising, and the internet [...] We need to begin, then, by asking ourselves: How do we imagine, depict or know the global?’1 In a way, Janine Marchessault’s gentle and insightful Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopia, Ecologies arises from this area of concern. Focusing on the ways in which a plethora of postwar media experiments engaged with conceptions of the global, the Earth and the planetary, Ecstatic Worlds proposes to think of ‘the world as a plural community’ (p. 9) at a time ‘when there is a need to seriously rethink our global connectivity’ (p. 12). In this aspect the book resonates with recent publications within neighbouring disciplines, which have explored the history of planetary consciousness largely within an epistemological framework whose genealogy originates in the aftermath of the war and culminates in the Apollo photographs.2 As Marchessault notes, ‘the cultures that arose immediately after the Second War [...] engaged with aspects of globalization, technological innovation, popular culture, and artistic experimentation as a means to build world communities through the power of media’ (p. 4). However, and this is to the book’s advantage, it actually features surprisingly little about the Apollo photographs, and Marchessault is certainly not interested in championing the disembodied gaze on a smoothly undifferentiated globe seen from afar – a ‘God’s eye perspective’ or ‘view from nowhere’ – that such photographs have been guilty of manufacturing. On the contrary, Ecstatic Worlds is attracted to phenomenological media and projects that are immersive, collective and interactive, works that aim to augment the viewer’s sensory perception of the world and thus constitute shape-shifting, ecological ‘environments’ in their own right

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