The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More Than Information Ecstasy?

The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More than Information Ecstasy?

Heather Houser

O n any day, the media consumer enters a garden of data delights just by paging through the newspaper, scanning social media feeds, and checking bookmarked blogs. Information stimulation is available everywhere in the form of data visualizations. Known variously as information visualizations, infographies, or "infovis"—the industry shorthand that I use here—these digital artifacts are fast becoming ubiquitous and are particularly suited to the Internet delivery system. Infovis, in its most general definition, is "the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition" (Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman 1999: 7). This definition captures graphical visualizations directed at specialized audiences such as the scatter plot as well as those addressing a lay audience that is not part of an extant disciplinary conversation.! with the latter type of infovis, designers and artists are transform- ing an instrumental tool long used in the quantitative sciences into a cultural tool that manages data overload, educates publics, and vaunts principles of sophisticated design. Popular visualizations act as an interface between the individual and data sets that are too large, complicated, inaccessible, or tedious for him or her to comprehend. They supplement news stories, promote corporate or nonprofit campaigns, hang in galleries, and circulate on websites that celebrate the most scin- tillating information art. These skillful artifacts can, according to one admirer, bring the viewer to the point of "infogasm" (Larsen 2012). They entice with "the

1. An image can move between specialist and nonspecialist functions, as when a visualization first created for an academic audience—for example, the readers of Nature or Science—adorns a blog post or the New York Times.

Public Culture 26;2 DOI 10.1215/08992363-2392084 Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press 319 Public Culture succinct allure of imagery" that not only pleases through astonishment but also promises to hone attention and instantaneously generate knowledge (ibid.). Infovis is protean in nature. It takes the form of maps, line graphs, flowcharts, time series displays, and trees, and straddles those time-honored functions of instructing and delighting. This essay examines two nonspecialist visualizations that made a splash in expert communities and across the Internet: Flight Pat- terns by Aaron Koblin, a visualizer with a far-reaching web and gallery presence, and The Timber Trade, an image that WWF (also known as the World Wild- life Fund for Nature) commissioned from GOOD (a blog, magazine, and design firm). Unlike specialist visualizations. Flight Patterns and Timber Trade rely on data that the designers did not themselves generate. This distinction clarifies the place of popular infovis in its cultural moment. Like the born-digital experimen- tal literature that Kenneth Goldsmith describes, popular infovis is "uncreative." The new style of innovator is one who cuts through the "thicket of information" that surrounds him or her and exhibits "genius" through "mastery of information and its dissemination" (Goldsmith 2011: 1). Though Goldsmith studies primarily literary culture, the process of recombining words and images culled from other sources applies equally well to visual culture. In both domains, the artist "filters" and "parses" rather than inventing de novo; clever selection and juxtaposition are his or her techniques (ibid.: 158-59). Or, put differently by Lev Manovich (2001: 124), in the early twenty-first century "authentic creation" is "replaced by selection from a menu." In contrast to much uncreative writing, visualizers' processes of selection respect the integrity of their raw materials. Though artists may not generate the data, their images must retain a degree of facticity at the same time as they engage audiences affectively, cognitively, and ethically. As a type of uncreative creativity that adapts to changing media delivery systems, infovis contributes to contemporary aesthetic and technological trends that emerge in the current age of information. They thus merit the attention of cultural critics. More specifically, those visualizations with an agenda centered on environmental issues invite questions from environmental critics about how their aesthetic features render visible and relevant the complexity of the phenomena that they depict. Environmentalists confront the task of changing public consciousness about issues such as global commerce and climate change in part by disseminating information, even as the wired public faces a deluge of sometimes contradictory or contested information. Environmentally focused infovis manages that information and aims to position viewers as responsible agents of knowledge. The viewer is frequently an implied world citizen who is technologi- cally literate and English-speaking and, depending on the context, may also be a

320 museumgoing aesthete.^ Crucially, the audience is imagined to contribute to the Aesthetics of conditions that the data engender. Specialist visualizations are meant to "move Environmental nature to the page" to further scientific inquiry, techniques, and tools (Daston Visualizations and Galison 2010: 121). Even if their accuracy and efficacy are under dispute, such images edify the audience within disciplinary paradigms, but neither the visualization nor the originating data invite the viewer to see him- or herself as complicit in the real-world processes under investigation. By contrast, popular infovis with an environmental focus implicates its audience in the information that it communicates and suggests that knowing the data is coextensive with being responsible for it. For these reasons, the predominant aesthetic principles not only have epistemological implications; they also make ethical appeals. Flight Patterns and Timber Trade address differing concerns: the former shows the number of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-monitored planes crossing North American airspace over twenty-four hours, while the latter depicts the traffic in wood products between exporting and importing nations around the globe. Despite their varying themes, the works both depict commercial trends using what I call a connect-the-dots aesthetic, constituted by an aerial perspective and finite lines, that privileges simplicity, transparency, and speed. I peg this aesthetic to an uneasy globalism and argue that values of data transparency minimize the difficulties of knowing in contexts marked by uncertainty and misinformation. Without question infovis is concise, vibrant, Internet ready, and perhaps even "infogasmic" and is a compelling means of bodying forth complex environmental and geopolitical arrangements. But can it be a techno-fix for environmental engagement? Or do its predominant aesthetic and epistemological values occlude the need to search for alternative dispositions toward environmentally damaging global commerce?

Connect the Dots: Ciobe and Line

Infovis isn't new to environmental discourse, as former vice president Al Gore's PowerPoint-driven An Inconvenient Truth (dir. David Guggenheim; 2006) read- ily attests. In a scene that combines the documentary's anecdotal and didactic modes. Gore examines Roger Revelle's line charts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration over the Pacific Ocean and cites them as his inspiration for climate activism beginning in the 1960s. For the film's information-rich climax,

2. When Andrew Losowsky (2001: 5) chides the field for being "painfully lacking in diversity." he speaks to the scene of production, but the same assessment likely pertains to the scene of con- sumption as well.

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Figure 1 Aaron KobVm, Flight Patterns. "The patins of air traffic over North America visuaiized in color and form." Digital image. Courtesy of the artist

Gore traces 650,000 years of CO2 levels and temperature variation in a visualization derived from paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson's research. Dramatizing the expression "off the charts," he climbs into a cherry picker that carries him up the giant screen to trace the staggering projections for CO2 and temperature increase over the next fifty years. Along with other specialist visualizations such as climatologists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes's ger- minal and controversial "hockey stick" graph, Revelle's and Thompson's charts have visually shaped current environmental debate. They have done so because environmentalists have trusted in their ability to shock and maybe even dismay audiences while bringing data into the home and out of the lab. With more sophisticated computing tools and techniques at their command, twenty-first-century visualizers such as Koblin innovate ways of delivering statistics to diverse publics. Koblin's star as a visualizer began to rise in 2005, when he released a series of images under the title Elight Patterns (see figs. 1-3).^ The visualizations earned him first prize in the National Science Foundation's (NSF)

3. Koblin first created Flight Patterns for the Celestial Mechanics project at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department of Design Media Arts. The visualizations were shown at the Japan Media Arts Festival and Ars Electrónica, among other venues, and were published in the proceedings of the 2009 SIGGRAPH Asia conference (Koblin 2009b).

322 Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations

Figure 2 Aaron Koblin. f//g/ií Patterns. "Atlanta." Digital image.Courtesy oí the artist

Figure 3 Aaron KobVm, Flight Patterns. Digital image. Courtesy of the artist

323 Public Culture 2006 Visualization Challenge and invitations to speak at a 2011 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference and to collaborate with artists, includ- ing Canadian band Arcade Fire on its 2010 video The Wilderness Downtown. For his visualization debut, Koblin accessed publicly available FAA text files of data on North American air traffic, parsed the data, plotted it, and created com- posites using effects and animation software."* The result was several variations on a theme. In some of these animations, data come alive as variously colored, black-and-white, and dotted lines cross the continent over time, with the colors and thickness of the lines coding aircraft type. In still images, gossamer lines describe regional hubs, and oily blobs show the intensity of traffic while alluding to the industry's dependence on fossil fuels. The launch of the NSF Visualization Challenge in 2003 acknowledged that visualizers' ambitions are not only technical and instrumental; they are also aesthetic and social. In Koblin's TED talk, he underscores this point with the claim that data-centered art patterns our aggregated behaviors; it tells "stories about our lives" so long as we "listen to our data." Depicting the frequency, rhythm, and trajectory of plane travel in the United States, Flight Patterns tells a story about the everyday, yet exceptional, activities that add up to "the complexity of aerial systems" (Koblin 2007b). This complexity of political, economic, and geographic arrangements determines the mobility of North Americans, the timetables of commerce, and the zones where jets are and are not permitted, arrangements that have social and environmental impacts. Visualizing these phenomena not only delivers a story; Koblin (2011) proclaims, "Data can actually make us more human." This thought is not unique to Koblin; the unqualified first-person plural and appeal to the universal human that appear in this statement resound in visualization theory. I elaborate on this point below but note here that this "we" invokes a universal subjectivity rooted in a collective capacity to employ the tools of rationality to perceive and interpret patterns and images.^ When this capacity is activated, as infovis projects like Koblin's suggest, the result is a form of "insight" peculiar to this cultural form: "the act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner" (Bertini and Lalanne 2009: 13). Because, by this account, insight is intuitive, it can also be instantaneous, a point Koblin (2007b) emphasizes in an interview with Win Rosenfeld: "You visualize [the flight data], and it instantly makes sense, and you can kind of instantly

4. For more technical specifications, see Koblin 2009a. 5. At the same time as he promotes universal humanness, Koblin makes a posthuman move when he reduces humans to their data.

324 Start to ask the right types of questions." When complexity and aesthetics are in Aesthetics of harmony, intuition and cognition align to promote inquiry about the world that Environmentai one inhabits and shapes. Edward R. Tufte, a statistician and visualization guru Visuaiizations responsible for the manifesto-manuals The Visual Display of Quantitative Infor- mation (2001 [1983]) and Envisioning Information (1990), offers a similar guid- ing principle to information designers: "Excellence in the display of information is a lot like clear thinking" (1997: 141). In short, then, infovis both presupposes and creates the unimpeded flow between data and image, between image and mind, and between mind and world. WWF's visualization of timber traffic has less explicitly aesthetic stakes than Koblin's works. It is a weapon in the organization's rhetorical arsenal for activist campaigns rather than a contribution to design competitions and gallery exhi- bitions. Yet, in representing global commercial activity of another sort. Timber Trade (view images online; see GOOD) shares with artistic infovis the ideal that right design leads to right thinking about interconnected environmental, social, and economic patterns, and it shares representational strategies to activate that thinking. The firm SectionDesign produced the visualization on a commission from GOOD and on behalf of WWF, one of the "Big Green" environmental non- profits with an international presence.^ The image enhances the group's Forest and Climate Initiative. It is set on a light gray background and draws the eye to the lower left-hand corner, where circles of red, gold, blue, green, and lime indicate the world's largest timber-exporting nations: Brazil, Congo, Indonesia, Madagas- car, and Papua New Guinea, respectively. Lines of the same colors fan out from the exporters and connect with all importing countries, with the United States and China topping the list. Where the lines hit country names, gray-scale spheres of varying sizes focus attention on a statistic for the amount of timber imported, measured in global hectares. When taken in as a whole, the portion of the image depicting imports describes a half circle evocative of an eclipsed radiant planet. Because of the image's high resolution, it is impossible to view it fully on a stan- dard computer screen unless zoomed out, from which vantage country names, import/export statistics, and the paths of the lines are illegible. In exchange for legibility, the viewer sees a fan-shaped array whose delicacy intimates the fragile natural and social environments that intensive forestry practices damage. The eye

6. Visualizing data is not only an aesthetic, scientific, and social venture; it is also a lucrative business. GOOD is one of several consultancies that generate graphics for advertising and public service campaigns. Carbon Visuals and CarbonSense are two others that count PepsiCo and HSBC Group among their clients.

325 Public Culture moves from image to caption, which employs a conversational tone to provoke the audience to investigate the effects of wood production and quotidian uses of timber. It explains, "In this high-tech world of metal and plastic, it's easy to forget that many things are still made with good, old-fashioned wood. Countries with lots of forest stand to benefit from the lucrative timber trade, but at what cost to their Ecological Footprint?" The piece poses this question, but the answer is not to be found within its frame. Those answers are available in WWF's published reports on commercial deforestation that feature Timber Trade, but the image quickly breaks out of this context as it becomes as mobile as the forest products whose data it records.'' The visualization floats free, turning up throughout WWF's web portfolio (e.g., else- where on wwf.org and on Tumblr and Flickr) and on third-party blogs without the accompanying research. As a cultural form, infovis is an effective carrier of bite- sized portions of information and enables that information to permeate varied institutional and medial contexts. However, the data's mobility requires that the accompanying campaign literature slough off. Now independent of exposition. Timber Trade's visual aesthetic strategies carry the entire burden of producing awareness about forest depletion and provoking reflection on the social and ecological impacts of extracting resources to serve distant needs. In WWF's image as in Koblin's, the main formal strategy for translating data about both human and commodity mobility is a connect-the-dots aesthetic and epistemology that contemporaneous environmental campaigns also deploy to advance understanding of planetary interconnectedness. Most notably. Bill McKibben's 350.org has led a worldwide political movement based on the injunc- tion to "connect the dots." The group's eponymous initiative marries climate data with poignant photographs and narratives of extreme weather events to encourage individuals to link seemingly isolated aberrations to large-scale climate disruption. Similarly, environmental artist Mary Miss enjoins her audience to associate local flooding events and global climate change through her 2007 Connect the Dots public installation in Boulder, Colorado. In the visualizations that are my focus here, an encompassing aerial perspective and an arrangement of finite lines constitute the connect-the-dots aesthetic and suggest an ease of seeing it all. The aerial perspective suits Flight Patterns' focus on air travel, and viewers likely don't give the choice a second thought. However, surveying the field of infovis shows that the aerial view is common to, if not utterly definitive of, the information aesthetic of environmental visualizations more broadly. The WWF image

7. The research reports are available at WWF, "Forests, Jungles, Woods, and Their Trees."

326 also trades on this visual norm that, as I examine below, gives much contempo- Aesthetics of rary environmental iconography its force. In the case of Timber Trade, however, Environmental aeriality is more schematic. The visualization offers a vantage modeled on the Visualizations globe and hatches it with the trajectories of timber but without describing topo- graphical boundaries. As already noted, the image's minutiae, such as the end- points of lines and the statistics, dissolve when viewers access the full view. In this respect, the connect-the-dots aesthetic unwittingly figures how globalism so frequently disconnects specific social and environmental impacts from the capi- talist exchanges that produce them. The formal features of Koblin's and WWF's works thus have an equivocal relation to global aeriality. On the one hand, their design aesthetic is isomorphic with the globalized commercial trends that they figure. They take advantage of the long-standing appeal of aerial earth images that figure the planet in two ways: as a "whole earth" "made up of interconnected life systems," and as "one earth," "a surface over which modern technological, communications, and financial systems increasingly . . . achieve coordinated simultaneity" under globalization (Cosgrove 2001: 14).« On the other hand, while Timber Trade and Elight Patterns draw energy from the aerial's time-honored appeal, critical skepticism toward the globalism on which flight and timber trade depend also inspires their projects. In other words, they deploy the representational strategies of globalism in order to prod viewers to inquire about globalization's deleterious effects. These pieces raise the question of whether the view from afar is in fact too close to the works' subject matter to agitate audiences. Can the visualizations' globalist aesthetic prompt reflection on the effects of globalized commerce and mobility? Put otherwise, should the visualizations' aesthetic not conform so closely to their content? The finite lines that trace the travel of planes and wood in Elight Patterns and Timber Trade might offer a representational contrast to the globalized aerial view. More generally, the line seems to be supplanting the sphere—the "circle of life" and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's iconic Blue Marble photograph—as the dominant geometry of environmental discourse. Arguably, the line has representational and epistemological currency in environmental rhetoric because it intimates action and not just perspective. It also has a legacy as the central design feature of scientific visualizations such as the charts and graphs that

8. Cosgrove (2001; 14) remarks upon the compatibility of these two planetary imaginaries, a compatibility that's evident in the web distribution of environmental infovis; "The conviction that disruption of the natural world by deforestation, atmospheric pollution, or desertification threatens a 'global' balance in nature has intensified as much through instantaneous global dissemination of information as through such activities themselves."

327 Public Culture Gore features in An Inconvenient Truth. Rather than offer an eye-opening, cosmo- logical vantage on environmental ills, it indicates a path back to their etiologies ' " • and forward to either inevitabilities or alternate outcomes. The lines of F/íg/ífPaí- terns and Timber Trade picture the movement, or "flows," of globalization with precision and carry with them the connotations that flow has accrued in globalist discourse: lack of interruption, smoothness, and even inevitability.' Moreover, the line that dominates the visual scheme of these works externalizes the production of awareness. Just as the visualizations' aerial perspective imitates the conditions of their critique, their linear features imitate their desired outcome: a foresee- able path from data on international trade, commerce, and resource availability to knowledge, reflection, and finally response to real-world conditions. Contradictions thus inhere in the aerial and linear elements of infovis's connect- the-dots aesthetic. The global aerial can create a more capacious, ecocentric imagination of the planet, a contention that surrounds the popularity of globe imagery within environmentalism: on the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 and as the logo for the 1992 Rio Farth Summit, to name just two locations. But, as Sheila Jasanoff (2004: 37) has shown, it cannot give viewers traction on "the dynamics of large natural systems" without erasing individuals' embodied environmental experience."* While putatively enlarging vision, the globe in fact flattens it. The line is similarly torn in its effects. Those in Flight Patterns and Timber Trade show that activity is taking place, but not how and why an object travels from point to point. It's a tool of description, not explanation, and leaves decision making and power structures outside of the images' frames. The connect-the-dots aesthetic makes the viewer master of the known, but the pressure to visualize complexity in a digestible form ends up excluding that very complexity. Accordingly, the minimalism of the line is also in tension with a primary objective of popular infovis: the impulse to narrative. The narrativity of infovis is thick on the ground in treatises on the form. Tufte (1997: 177) explains that "attractive displays of statistical information . . . often have a narrative quality, a story to tell about the data," and novelist Reif Larsen (2012) concurs that the best graphics "linger in our imagination by nurturing our hunger for cultural nar-

9. I derive this point from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005: xiii), who analyzes globalist dreams of a "single imperial system" free of "friction." I elaborate on her contributions in the next section. 10. Jasanoff examines the Western cultural specificity of the Blue Marble icon and takes on claims that it created a more ecological and democratizing gaze for environmental ethics. Ursula K. Heise (2008: 385) likewise tempers enthusiasm that the image radically altered environmental vision, but her argument is that, despite having this global vantage, environmentalism still "invested most of its imaginative and aesthetic capital into the reconception of the local subject."

328 ration." The challenge, then, is to uphold the oft-cited values of infovis, namely. Aesthetics of simplicity, clarity, and instantaneity, while elaborating data's intricate stories and Environmental sparking a craving for more." How does a story about global trade, land decima- Visualizations tion, and intensive mobility emerge from the parsimonious, if multiple, lines of connect-the-dots infovis? In what follows, I do not try to resolve the contradiction between simplicity and narrativity that this question suggests but instead identify both the epistemological and ethical assumptions of connect-the-dots infovis that takes for granted the compatibility of transparency and story.

"Contamination by Transparency"

Ultimately, the aesthetic that I'm detailing here is predicated on forms of transparency that promote the transmission of data but that cause the obscurity and even trickery of data to recede from view. I take up three values of transparency that seem to govern infovis. First, while the belief that data are inscrutable and affectively neutral unless visualized informs the project of infovis, data sets are frequently taken as givens, as facts. Against this view, we might heed Geoffrey Bowker's pronouncement that " 'raw data' is both an oxymoron and a bad idea" (quoted in Gitelman and Jackson 2013: 1); "data need to be imagined as data to exist and function as such, and the imagination of data entails an interpretative base" (ibid.: 3). More sedulous popular visualizers cite their sources, but rarely do they specify the original methods of data gathering and analysis, information that shows the making, rather than the givenness, of the subtending statistics. Second, designers presume representational transparency, which has two aspects: an ease with which an image enters the viewer's mind and a univocality of the knowledge that it produces. "Crystalline" is the visualization descriptor that expresses this value of transparency (Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman 1999: 10). Third, infovis makes claims to ethical transparency. Environmental visualization projects aim to spur inquiry about the phenomena depicted and to cultivate responsibility for their impacts. They return to information the meaning of the word's Latin etymon, informare: "to give form to ... to describe ... to mould (a person, or a person's mind) by instruction" (OED Online 2012). If for Tufte (1997: 141) "excellence in the display of information is a lot like clear thinking," for infovis, it's a lot like clear conviction as well. Data, representational, and ethical transparency are interdependent: the ready transit between knowing and taking responsibility is predicated on the image's ability to carry uncontested data.

II. These values are articulated in either endorsing or skeptical terms in Daston and Galison 2010; Elkins 1995; Klanten, Ehmann, and Schulze 2011; Latour 1986; and Tufte 2001 [1983].

329 Public Culture Extolling infovis's transparency serves claims to the cultural form's instantaneity, mass appeal, and potential to change viewers' consciousness. But it also leans on the rhetoric of universalism that I identified above. Infovis is thought to speak an "international language" that "capitalize [s] on humans' natural ability to spot patterns and relationships in visual fields" (Peter Grundy quoted in Klanten, Ehmann, and Schulze 2011: 44; Corby 2008: 462). From particular data sets to a "universal" language, from seeing to feeling, from feeling to responsibility, from responsibility to action, infovis seems to be a perfect conversion engine. In a 2008 TED talk, photographer and visualizer Chris Jordan underscores this universalizing vision of infovis. He declares his mission to be "to take these num- bers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues . . . then they'll matter to us more than they do now. . . . Then we'll be able to ... face the big question, which is: How do we change?" (Jor- dan 2008). There are no breaks, dams, or disturbances in the transformation of data into actionable knowledge, according to such a view. Within the visualization profession, however, there has been pushback against trust in transparency. Paolo Ciuccarelli, director of the Milanese information design lab DensityDesign, warns against the "illusion of easy knowledge" and advocates the need for greater visualization literacy (quoted in Klanten, Ehmann, and Schulze 2011: 10). Infor- mation artists have also begun speaking out against misrepresentations of events and statistics and have laid out best practices for visualizations, especially those with a journalistic function (see "Statement against Fictional Infographies" 2011; Tufte 2001 [1983]: 53-77; 2006). While some in the field recognize the problems with assuming data transparency, enthusiastic pronouncements that infovis communicates directly and universally still dominate the rhetoric around the practice. Muted are the noisy forms of mediation—from race, gender, sexuality, and class to technological literacy and the varieties of visual processing—that crowd the pathways between data, image, knowledge, and response. Confidence that infovis directly transmits univocal meanings and outcomes might astonish, and even frustrate, cultural critics steeped in decades of scholar- ship detailing the sociocultural filters through which we process artworks and images more broadly. But perhaps this disposition shouldn't come as such a sur- prise for a reason that author Michael Joyce (2011: 93) adduces: the appeal of "contamination by transparency." In other words, transparency has a phenomeno- logical pull, promising to deliver a reality that's outside our own perceptual and cognitive fields. This immediacy is compelling on cultural and ethical grounds.

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.1;,,: and it is also historically rooted.'2 Flight Patterns and Timber Trade position the Aesthetics of viewer above the earth, condense facts and events into tidy lines, and minimize Environmental text with confidence not only in the transparency of the cultural form but also in Visualizations the power of the moment, the temporal correlate of transparency.'^ Designed for the kinds of glancing reading and viewing that the Internet engenders, infovis relies on the first, quick impression for its efficacy. The snapshot is its privileged form. Though the animated versions of Flight Patterns act as timepieces in that the ebb and flow of air traffic corresponds to day breaking across the continent, Koblin still provides an experience of the moment by pairing thirty-second animations with static visualizations. To understand the longing for immediacy, it is useful to consider cognate visions of transparency from the discourses of globalism and of new media that inform infovis aesthetics. First, popular visualizations often give viewers pur- chase on the exchanges of capital, objects, people, and culture that globalization promotes. They do not just take globalization trends as their theme, however; as I have shown, the global perspective shapes their connect-the-dots aesthetic. Flight Patterns and Timber Trade employ the aerial view as a clear lens on the traffic of people and commodities that transform social relations and environments. They adopt the view that aeriality is intuitive. Their aesthetic strategies invite similar questions to those that anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing raises regarding globalist discourse: Can anything—from information and knowledge to commodities and capital—ever flow freely, without "friction"? She examines "the popularity of stories of a new era of global motion in the 1990s ... [in which] the flow of goods, ideas, money, and people would henceforth be pervasive and unimpeded. In this imagined global era, motion would proceed entirely without friction" (Tsing 2005: 5). Groups of contrasting ideological stripes represented by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the one hand, and the World Trade Orga- nization, on the other, share this imagination of a friction-free global connected- ness even as they put it to different political and economic ends. "Explor[ing] just how knowledge moves," Tsing (2005: 13) counters that friction is at the very core of globalization since globalization connects parties with sometimes conflicting cultural narratives, programs of nation and region making, economic imperatives,

12. The longing for medial transparency and immediacy is elaborated on in Bolter and Grusin 1999 (see esp. chap. I). 13. Paul Virilio is the most prominent theorist of how speed and instantaneity in the digital age transform political systems and lived reality. Virilio's "Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!" (1995) and The Information Bomb (2000) are most relevant to my arguments here. See also Gleick 1999.

331 Public Culture and conceptual categories. Tsing's project is admittedly quite different from mine in that it details the collaborations and disputes that arise when wide-ranging groups compete over the Indonesian rain forest, but I take from her study the provocation to contest globalist imaginaries, in particular their epistemological underpinnings and manifestations. If, indebted to global imaginaries, connect-the-dots infovis presumes the unobstructed fiow of knowledge and ethics, it also trades on assumptions about how new media fluidly enter the mind. Marshall McLuhan's early and enduringly influential Understanding Media (1994 [1964]) argued for the direct communica- bility of media, content aside. His thesis that every medium offers an "extension of consciousness" (ibid.: 57) remains a resource for theoretical accounts of twenty- first-century media innovations, whether they endorse or contest McLuhan's position that media enhance, supplement, and supplant cognitive processes.''' Infovis extends McLuhan's thesis into the era of multiple digital platforms and sophisticated processing, graphics, and animation software. Indeed, the term visualization itself endorses McLuhan's point about extension by implying that the media artifact is coterminous with the eyes and brain that process it. As with globalism, the coefficient of infovis's implied extension thesis is a universalization of human capacities to see and know. Rather than trust in transparency, environmental artists and critics must pursue the central theoretical question that this value obscures: How does the aesthetic form of infovis not only put environmental phenomena before viewers' eyes but also activate reflection on their participation in those phenomena, as either pro- tagonists or antagonists? The problem here chimes with Bruce Robbins's (2002) account of "the sweatshop sublime." While seemingly empowering, works deploy- ing a God's-eye view of world systems are often wanting because "sudden, heady access to the global scale is not access to a commensurate power of action on the global scale" (ibid. : 85). Visualizations that offer this rush of world-encompassing data invite attention from environmental critics because they highlight the forms that digital media literacy takes. At the same time as infovis rouses admiration for the artist's facility with big data sets and the technologies that aestheticize them, it also invites critics to specify how powers of seeing do or do not encourage "power[s] of action." One such obstruction deserves brief mention: uncertainty. Where lack of publicly available information was once a prevailing concern for

14. Understanding Media's first definition of medium as extension establishes the intimacy between the globalized perspective and new electronic media; "We have extended our central ner- vous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is con- cerned" (McLuhan 1994 [1964]; 3).

332 environmentalists, today disinformation and the misrepresentation of scientific Aesthetics of uncertainty stymie individual and collective responses to environmental threats. Environmental Paul Virilio (1995) puts this forcefully when he declaims that "no information Visualizations exists without dis-information," especially when information threatens profit. For decades, corporate-sponsored think tanks and the scientists and politicians whom they fund have been "merchandising doubt," a phrase Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (2010: 9) coin in their exposé of antiscience, proindustry disinformation campaigns. To promote doubt, scientists in the pay of antiregulation political groups manufacture partisan science to counter peer-reviewed studies of everything from tobacco and pesticide health risks to ozone depletion and climate change. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, media outlets have given these erroneous scientific studies a forum "as if they were a 'side' in a scientific debate. ... In all of this, journalists and the public never understood that these were not scientific debates ... but misinformation" (ibid.: 7). In the early twenty-first century, then, transparency is an ever more precarious assumption. Environmental artists, activists, critics, and teachers now contend with the forces of unknowing when they render environmental processes and threats. The task of visualization artists is undeniably large: they must consider the kinds of knowing that particular representational strategies promote as well as the kinds of "doubt-mongering" that may cause viewers to dismiss all inconvenient data as partisan (ibid.: 34). Certainly, infovis delivers information to a wide audience and titillates viewers with its design and technological sophisti- cation, but extensive dissemination and "infogasm" don't nullify the conditions of disinformation. When visualizations adopt aesthetic and epistemological principles predicated on fluid trajectories from data to image to mind to action, they disregard not only the question of precisely how environmental art activates audiences but also the messy milieu of uncertainty and doubt in which it circulates.

Infovis as Technological Fix

Transparency underpins a model of awakening in which perception, knowledge, and response follow on from each other seamlessly, a model that appeals as a quick fix not only for information saturation but also for an environmental ethics. My concern is that, while infovis neatly fits into a cultural moment of "uncreativity" and participates in a shift toward Internet activism, the intricate dynamics of aesthetics and audience reception too easily recede from view. Of course visualizers are not the only cultural producers who face the challenge of how to promote viewer engagement. No single artifact can lay smooth ground for an environmental ethic.

333 Public Culture and there are no blueprints for aesthetic politics. And still the question of how the aesthetic form of any environmental representation ferries audiences from perception to involvement is arguably the most formidable one that environmental critics face. Popular infovis is a ripe cultural form for this research agenda because it cap- tivates the eye and moves data-based information into the public sphere along multiple channels: journalism, art, activism, science, social media, and even fiction. N o t only is infovis ubiquitous; visualization devotees are also notably optimistic about the powers of data representation to contribute to public debates about environmental crises. Moreover, Timber Trade's and Flight Patterns' primary geometries and color palette—line and circle, in red, blue, green, black, and gray—delight by sug- gesting mastery over complexity and seeming to totalize the information situation. The visual fields of both works are skillfully balanced: Koblin's lines reach out to the four corners of the frame, and SectionDesign's differently weighted spheres act as counterbalances. The satisfactions of producing and consuming infovis are, in short, great. However, popular infovis's aesthetic values of simplicity, speed, cer- tainty, and transparency call into being an audience of shock absorbers or of vessels for input even as the discourse around the cultural form and its use by environmental campaigners envision more active constituencies. Despite these concerns, infovis at this moment presents as a kind of techno-fix for environmental culture. It is akin to the "green" technological solutions to emis- sions reduction or agricultural production that crowd out discussion about deeper changes to structures of environmental and social inequity. Just as the electric car stands to deliver us from climate disruption while preserving the hallowed act of isolated automobility, infovis stands to make us ethical actors by proxy while keeping us at our laptops and smartphones, following trending hashtags and Instagram photos. Visualization theory is undeniably audience-oriented insofar as it aims to inform and awaken viewers. Environmental groups' and consultancies' investments in the cultural form attest to this orientation. Yet the aesthetic coordinates of infovis and its undergirding epistemology of transparency in fact construct a passive audience. The technological wonderment that surrounds these media objects contributes to this construction. In Koblin's (2011) TED address, he draws in the audience with the compelling claim that "data can actually make us more human," but the remainder of the twenty-minute presentation focuses on the software, image-manipulation tools, and other techniques that he employs to create the visualizations.15 Euphoric inventories of technological specifications align with the satisfactions of "infogasm," but they also open the question of whether

15. In interviews and lectures, Jordan also prioritizes process over meaning or effect.

334 infovis privileges the technology over its professed ambitions. It's as if the power Aesthetics of of action ultimately inheres in the technology itself. Put otherwise, technologi- Environmentai cal know-how alone would seem to alter social and environmental arrangements, Visualizations and viewers' dispositions recede in importance. In light of this confidence, it's important to recall that, to paraphrase Lauren Berlant (2008: 849), knowing the global traffic of bodies and commodities does not necessarily make those patterns vulnerable to dispute or to transformation. My assessments of the impulse to globalism, transparency, and the quick fix should not encourage cynicism or suggest that there is no place for infovis in environmental activism and art. Rather, the point is that the formal, rhetorical, and affective devices whereby this enthralling cultural form addresses social and environmental phenomena have much to teach environmentalists and critics about the aesthetics of knowledge production. The ready consumability of infovis can paint over the distinctions between data, representation, knowledge, and individual or collective response that pertain to all varieties of environmental art. Yet, in my analysis, it's precisely these distinctions that the cultural form italicizes. Infovis is undoubtedly an emergent optic for visualizing environments and their endangerment. The task for the environmental humanities is to interpret how this increasingly popular form mediates information and visuality as part of an envi- ronmentalist enterprise in a digital age.

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Heather Houser is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book is Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014). IHer publications include essays in American Literature {2012), Contemporary Literature (2010), American Book Review (2010), and the collection The Legacy of David Foster Waiiace {2012).

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