The Environmental Gaze: : Visual perspectives on monitoring landscapes of ecological devastation

Summary, in English

The increasing application of monitoring technologies and the specific perspectives afforded through them are transforming our understanding of and relationship to our environment. Through systems of mass data accrual, the physical processes and elemental attributes of regional and planetary landscapes are transformed into media, such as digital multilayered maps, graphs, thermal imaging, models, and 3D simulations. Yet, aside from this transformation of environmental processes into data, there is also the recognition that the physical landscape and its attributes are themselves forms of media, which can mediate between temporalities of past and present and relationships between a subject and an object. To this end, this chapter examines the aesthetics of environmental monitoring through a visual culture and art historical perspective by focusing on the enactment of an environmental gaze as a theoretical intervention into the ways in which physical landscapes are seen, represented, and transformed into information through the visual field of environmental monitoring technologies. This examination focuses on narratives that emerge from the artworks of Imani Jacqueline Brown and her critical approach toward visualizations of the coastal wetlands of Louisiana, a site of ecological devastation with a history of intense extractivism. These are explored against the backdrop of two other sources of data imaging and environmental monitoring of the same landscape: the multilayered data maps of a federal conservation project, the Coastwide Reference Monitoring System (CRMS), and the cross-referencing of multiple visual data sources by Forensic Architecture in collaboration with the non-profit, RISE St. James as examples of environmental data production that help to define present environmental problems—such as toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Through utilizing both remote and local views and with a specific framing of temporal relations and outcomes, these two sources enact forms of an all-encompassing environmental gaze that can be associated with scientific and militaristic contexts. In contrast, Brown’s artworks have an open-ended outcome that questions the potentialities of such an environmental gaze. Her works do this through addressing how notions of landscape can instead be understood through embodiment, expanding the contexts of its temporal scales and foregrounding meaning in situated and partial views.

• Author: Lila Lee-Morrison
• Editor: Karen M’Closkey; Keith Vandersys
• Department/s: Department of Sociology
• Publishing year: 2024
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Media Matters
• Document type: Book chapter
• Publisher: Oro Publications
• Topic: Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
• Status: Inpress
• Project: Show & Tell: Scientific representation, algorithmically generated visualizations, and evidence across epistemic cultures