Description
Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She 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.
Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Oregon
In prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of
Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of
Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [
Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *
An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . .
Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *
A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . .
Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the Infowhelm
Part I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface
1. Making Data Experiential
2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate Narratives
Part II. The New Natural HistoryPreface
3. Classifictions
4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”
Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface
5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky
6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative Fiction
Epilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
