In a everyday marked by the Anthropocene and the permanence of mobile technologies, this study investigates the question of whether and how audiovisual short-narratives can articulate different forms of resistance to the climatic crisis and to the performative logic of digital culture. The object of analysis is a specific form of storytelling emerging on TikTok: the Green Cinematic Vlogs (GCVs), short videos produced by Gen Z users that combine the visual codes of the cine- matic trend with aesthetics, sonorities and temporalities referable to ecocinema. The analysis is based on a visual qualitative approach applied to a selected corpus of GCVs published on TikTok between 2024 and 2025, chosen for their aesthetic and affective relevance in the field of ecological perception. The theoretical perspective is articulated from three points: the assemblage theory, that allows to interpret these contents as dynamic configurations in which human subjects, land- scapes, mobile devices, algorithms and affects co-produce forms of ecological awareness; John Dewey’s aesthetics of experience, suggesting that these vlogs generate perceptual intensifications in the situated relationship between body and environment and, finally, the Deleuzian conception of art as resistance, which helps in reading these videos as micropolitical acts that disarticulate the dominant regimes of visibility. The essay illustrates how these videos do not merely represent generational eco-anxiety, but they reconfigure it into affective and perceptual practices of sensi- tive co-existence with the environment. These contents translate consciousness of environmental collapse into a sensitive practice of co-existence with the landscape. Through aesthetics of slow- ness, attention to the minimal gesture and atmospheric modulations, these GCVs activate minor ecologies of perception that stand in friction with the accelerative, spectacular and performative logics of mobile culture.
VISUAL ASSEMBLAGES, ECOLOGICAL SUBJECTIVITIES AND VERNACULAR FORMS OF RESISTANCE: TIKTOK’S GREEN VIDEOS
Paola Lamberti
2025
Abstract
In a everyday marked by the Anthropocene and the permanence of mobile technologies, this study investigates the question of whether and how audiovisual short-narratives can articulate different forms of resistance to the climatic crisis and to the performative logic of digital culture. The object of analysis is a specific form of storytelling emerging on TikTok: the Green Cinematic Vlogs (GCVs), short videos produced by Gen Z users that combine the visual codes of the cine- matic trend with aesthetics, sonorities and temporalities referable to ecocinema. The analysis is based on a visual qualitative approach applied to a selected corpus of GCVs published on TikTok between 2024 and 2025, chosen for their aesthetic and affective relevance in the field of ecological perception. The theoretical perspective is articulated from three points: the assemblage theory, that allows to interpret these contents as dynamic configurations in which human subjects, land- scapes, mobile devices, algorithms and affects co-produce forms of ecological awareness; John Dewey’s aesthetics of experience, suggesting that these vlogs generate perceptual intensifications in the situated relationship between body and environment and, finally, the Deleuzian conception of art as resistance, which helps in reading these videos as micropolitical acts that disarticulate the dominant regimes of visibility. The essay illustrates how these videos do not merely represent generational eco-anxiety, but they reconfigure it into affective and perceptual practices of sensi- tive co-existence with the environment. These contents translate consciousness of environmental collapse into a sensitive practice of co-existence with the landscape. Through aesthetics of slow- ness, attention to the minimal gesture and atmospheric modulations, these GCVs activate minor ecologies of perception that stand in friction with the accelerative, spectacular and performative logics of mobile culture.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
