Shimmering Data and Ecological Collaboration: Paying Attention to Intruding Ecological Situations

Abstract

The alarming effects of global warming and the challenges associated with the Anthropocene have emerged as two of the defining problems (re)organising and (re)orienting contemporary knowledge projects across the arts and sciences. As such, scientists, artists and theorists are increasingly working to find ways to transform their practices and methods in order to account for the problems of scale and complexity that characterise the challenges of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic global warming. This essay, therefore, will examine two different knowledge projects built to address and respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic global warming. I will begin at the scale of the globe and planet by discussing the achievement of climate and Earth system scientists to produce computer models that reliably simulate global climate changes, and examine how these models have consequences for forms of eco-political practice. From there, the second part of this essay will examine another scale-building, relation-building and meaning-making apparatus that differently empowers situated humans and nonhumans. Specifically, I will examine the art/science practices of Natalie Jeremijenko that enrol ecological knowledge technologies, like air quality sensors, to build ecological structures of participation that draw people, technologies and nonhumans together into situated encounters that activate open source, user-generated ecological interpretations and entanglements. In the end, the knowledge practices I will discuss contribute to a shift in the way artists and scientists perceive, feel and connect to ecological phenomena in the Anthropocene as they work to render sensible and intelligible aspects of complex ecological phenomena in ways that challenge traditional science/politics, subjective/objective distinctions.