An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds.--ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
Houser 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
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.--Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Oregon
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.--Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
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 Fiction
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.--Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing