Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data

Literature Now

by Heather Houser

How do artists and writers engage with environmental knowledge in the face of overwhelming information about catastrophe? What kinds of knowledge do the arts produce when addressing climate change, extinction, and other environmental emergencies? What happens to scientific data when it becomes art? In Infowhelm , Heather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in an age of climate crisis and information overload.

Houser argues that the infowhelm―a state of abundant yet contested scientific information―is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises. Infowhelm analyzes how artists transform the techniques of the sciences into aesthetic material, repurposing data on everything from butterfly migration to oil spills and experimenting with data collection, classification, and remote sensing. Houser traces how artists ranging from novelist Barbara Kingsolver to digital memorialist Maya Lin rework knowledge traditions native to the sciences, entangling data with embodiment, quantification with speculation, precision with ambiguity, and observation with feeling. Their works provide new ways of understanding environmental change while also questioning traditional distinctions between types of knowledge. Bridging the environmental humanities, digital media studies, and science and technology studies, this timely book reveals the importance of artistic medium and form to understanding environmental issues and challenges our assumptions about how people arrive at and respond to environmental knowledge.

336 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2020

Reviews

[Laura Op de Beke · Rating 4 out of 5]

We’ve all known that feeling of Infowhelm. I first experienced it in my high school geography class watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I’m referring specifically to the scene where Gore unveils the hockey stick graph, for which he has to get on a platform lift to reach its upper right corner. I felt awe and fear, but with an edge of giddiness to it, at the ridiculous theatricality of the performance, and also in response to what felt like the fictionality of the future evoked by the graph. Infowhelm sets out to analyze moments like these, where the confrontation with climate change information arouses complex, contradictory affective responses. In order to do so Houser draws on scholarship of visual culture, literary studies, and science and technology studies – although remarkably, she leaves affect rather undertheorized. This means that even though the book paints a comprehensive picture of the way in which climate change information, and informational practices configure contemporary artistic and cultural expression, its exploration of the feelings and emotions involved in the reception of these narratives and images lacks a certain range.

It all boils down to mastery and humility. Before climate change data migrates to other (media) environments where it serves different purposes and audiences, it is usually conceived in scientific contexts where positivist epistemologies reign supreme. Positivism “holds that legitimate knowledge of real-world phenomena is based in logic, observability, objectivity, and universality and is verifiable, preferably through quantitative measures” (5). Positivism thus engenders a sense of informational mastery that says we are able to understand, map, and predict the course of events in a satisfactory manner. But “Data never stands alone” (32), and especially in its appropriation in art and culture, positivism is made to vie with other knowledge systems, be they speculative, affective, or anecdotal. The resulting entangled epistemologies, though not entirely dismissive of positivism and its methods, contribute a more situated perspective that emphasizes the biases of information technologies, its limitations, as well as its dangers.

That said, Infowhelm’s first chapter, which looks at carbon footprint calculators, climate change visualizations, and other means of concretizing data, or “making data experiential,” is a terrific read for those interested in a more generous take on the kind of media objects so quickly dismissed in the humanities for being questionably commercial and corporate. This is the chapter where Houser gets closest to explaining what data feels like in the day to day – which means engaging, albeit briefly, with other affects besides mastery and humility, for example boredom. The book’s other chapters are equally well-written and rigorously argued, but the range of affects discussed narrows down considerably after chapter one, most likely to ensure thematic cohesiveness across a diverse corpus – which includes novels, poems, films, satellite images, as well as works of visual art.

[Claire Abs]

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