Biodiversity data as public environmental media: Citizen science projects, national databases and data visualizations

Through a combination of scientific and community activity, our environment is increasingly registered and documented as data. Given the expanding breadth of this digital domain, it is crucial that scholars consider the problems it presents as well as its affirmative potential. This article, arising from collaboration between a practitioner and theorist in digital design and a film and screen scholar with expertise in documentary and environmental studies, critically examines biodiversity data through an ecocritical reading of public-facing databases, citizen science platforms and data visualizations. We examine the Atlas of Living Australia; Canberra Nature Map; the City of Melbourne’s Insects; and the experimental visualization Local Kin. Integrating perspectives from screen studies, design and the environmental humanities, including multispecies studies approaches in anthropology, we examine how digital representations reflect the way biodiversity data is produced and structured. Critically analysing design choices – what is shown, and how it is shown – we argue that biodiversity data on-screen provides specific affordances: allowing, encouraging or discouraging certain insights and possibilities that condition our knowledge of and engagement with living things. An interdisciplinary approach allows us to ask new questions about how users might experience multispecies worlds in digital form, and how biodiversity data might convey the complexities of an entangled biosphere, amplifying understanding, connection and attention amongst interested publics. We examine the visual rhetorics of digital biodiversity in order to better understand how these forms operate as environmental media: designed representations of the living world.

Visual Rhetoric

Visual rhetorics is not limited to socio-communicative connections, for example, a text and illustration, and, accordingly, a reader/viewer. Visual rhetorics is aimed at examining the process of formation of a visual object in time and space, as well as the prospects for studying visual information — the value of the integrity of the object and the hierarchy of its components. Visual rhetoric is based on mnemonic reception - artists and its viewers combine memory and imagination. A person of such a culture can rightly be called homo rhetoricus. Visual rhetorics, it must be understood, is not only related to fine arts or architecture. It is no coincidence that at present the rhetorics of culture is also developing widely, which can be described as the following entymema: art is rhetorical, since it falls within the scope of the culture of homo rhetoricus.

Senegal, the African Slave Trade, and the Door of No Return: Giving Witness to Gorée Island

Recently, the Senegalese people have learned to speak more openly of their history. But, as late as the 1980s—the years of my youth and early schooling—the wounds of colonialism were still fresh. I contend that slavery had been so powerful a blow to the Senegalese ethos that we—my family, friends, and schoolmates—did not speak about it. The collective trauma and shame of slavery was apparently so powerful that we sought to repress it, keeping it hidden from ourselves. We were surrounded by its evidence, but chose not to see it. Such was my childhood experience. As an adult, I understand that repression never heals wounds. The trauma remains as a haunting presence. But one can discover its “living presence,” should one choose to look. Just 5.2 km off the west African coast of Senegal lies Gorée Island, where millions of Africans were held captive while awaiting transport into slavery. Much of the four-century history of the African slave trade passed through Senegal, where I grew up. In this essay, I explore the history of the island and its role in the slave trade. I describe my own coming to terms with this history—how it has haunted me since my youth. And I argue for the role of visual rhetorics in the formation (and affirmation) of Senegalese ethos. As Baumlin and Meyer (2018) remind us, we need to speak, in order to be heard, in order to be seen: Such is an assumption of rhetorical ethos. And the reverse, as I shall argue, may be true, too: Sometimes we need to see (or be seen), in order to know what to speak and how to be heard. It is for this reason that we need more films written, directed, produced, and performed by Africans (Senegalese especially).

Body Rhetorics and Kinesthetic Empathy in the Video Game Bound (2016)

Dance is found in every known human culture as part of religious, social and healing ceremonies. The increased interest in the role of dance in western psychology corresponds with the creation of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) founded by Marian Chace, and the beginning of the dance movement therapy (DMT). The Association introduced the dance and the dance-based movement as part of the therapeutic process, in order to explore the relationship between the expression of individual emotions and movement. Drawing both from the visual rhetorics approach (Patterson and Corning 1997) and the game studies (Fernández-Vara 2009) I will analyze the multiple narrative layers in the Bound video game (2016), pointing to the mutual relationship the player and the game have on each other (Keogh 2018) decoding the game as a metaphor for the therapeutic effects of dance.

Visual Rhetorics and the Seductions of the Monstrous: Some Precautionary Observations

What does it mean to look at the monstrous? For many people, monstrous embodiment in its many forms arouses discomfort that is more or less successfully managed through the medium of our differential senses. While the creation of an interval between self and other through sight and representation allows for a reassuring self-security, there is also the sense of a certain destabilising ‘yuk’ factor present. Yet, our persistent fascination with the monstrous speaks to a profound longing that may manifest not just in curiosity about the strange, but as a form of desire. In critical cultural studies, the complications of Freudian and Lacanian desire clearly provide a platform for understanding the seductiveness of the monstrous, but are now more often surpassed by the celebration of a reconfigured and wholly positive desire in its Deleuzian sense. At the same time our longing for the monstrous denotes a desire for the grasp of knowledge and for the domestication of anomaly. As such I want to expand on the familiar uneasiness that showing images of the monstrous potentially provokes and its putative encouragement of an undoubted voyeurism, to engage instead with a Derridean exhortation to preserve the strangeness, and with an reparative reading through Deleuze that offers reasons to be hopeful.

Domesticating Wilderness: How Nature and Culture Converge in the Museum Space

My thesis compares the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History and High Line park. I argue that museums and other cultural institutions using museological methodologies seek to construct specific visual rhetorics and narratives in order to shape how visitors define, understand, and place themselves in relation to nature. Both spaces use a combination of artistic display techniques informed by a foundation of scientific knowledge to represent the results of major shifts in thought about how we define nature and respond to problematic human impacts from the eras prior to their construction. The Hall of North American Mammals uses diorama displays that most prominently feature iconic species of animals and majestic landscape paintings, following in a traditional style and appreciation for nature that emerged from specific artistic and scientific developments through the nineteenth century. Conversely, the High Line uses architecture and sculptural planting design to guide visitors along a predetermined series of vignettes that display not only the park itself but also contemporary art and the surrounding New York landscape, following an environmentally-minded ethic that emerged with the twentieth century environmental movement. Though both sites promote an aesthetic appreciation of nature that has origins in the visual culture established in the nineteenth century, the High Line attempts to contemporize this experience through the synthesis of nature and human activity while the Hall of North American Mammals rests more firmly in a dated experience of nature as an other, separated from the human realm.