Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data

Heather Houser

Published by Columbia University Press 2020

Infowhelm

Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data

Heather Houser

https://doi.org/10.7312/hous18732

Overview
Contents

About this book

Heather 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.

Author / Editor information

Heather Houser is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also codirects the Planet Texas 2050 project focused on climate resilience. She is the author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia, 2014) and an associate editor at Contemporary Literature.

Reviews

Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing:
It 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.

Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative:
Amidst 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.

Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction:
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.

Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Oregon:
Infowhelm 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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Environmental Art in the Infowhelm Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 1. Cultural Climate Knowledge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Part 2. The New Natural History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Part 3. Aerial Environmentalisms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
Epilogue: Can Thinking Make It So? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
WORKS CITED Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 37 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: August 24, 2020
ISBN: 9780231547208