Abstract
Nathalie Miebach’s Harvey Twitter SOS (2019) is a multimedia artwork based on
meteorological data and twitter responses to Hurricane Harvey’s impact on the city of Houston, Texas, USA. It forms part of the artists Weather Scores Project (2009- present). Inspired by claims offered by theorists and artists around art and the Anthropocene in the environmental humanities and ecomedia studies, I suggest that Miebach’s questioning and reimagining of the relationship between humans, technology, and their environment, challenges the dominance of visual imagery and other representations of the Anthropocene. Harvey Twitter SOS offers a valuable site for interrogating how extant systems of visualization have limited perspectives and possibilities according to the biopolitical hierarchies which they help enforce. Thus, I argue that Harvey Twitter SOS presents an
alternative to these systems, one which embraces the fragmentary reality of the Anthropocene over the totalizing imaginary offered by pure visuality. Through the distinctive relationship between the audio and the visual in Miebach’s practice, I conclude, her work models an approach that opens-up space for more pluralized narratives, free of the false binaries of objectivity and subjectivity.
meteorological data and twitter responses to Hurricane Harvey’s impact on the city of Houston, Texas, USA. It forms part of the artists Weather Scores Project (2009- present). Inspired by claims offered by theorists and artists around art and the Anthropocene in the environmental humanities and ecomedia studies, I suggest that Miebach’s questioning and reimagining of the relationship between humans, technology, and their environment, challenges the dominance of visual imagery and other representations of the Anthropocene. Harvey Twitter SOS offers a valuable site for interrogating how extant systems of visualization have limited perspectives and possibilities according to the biopolitical hierarchies which they help enforce. Thus, I argue that Harvey Twitter SOS presents an
alternative to these systems, one which embraces the fragmentary reality of the Anthropocene over the totalizing imaginary offered by pure visuality. Through the distinctive relationship between the audio and the visual in Miebach’s practice, I conclude, her work models an approach that opens-up space for more pluralized narratives, free of the false binaries of objectivity and subjectivity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | (In-Press) |
| Journal | Official Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present |
| Volume | (In-Press) |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 15 Apr 2023 |
Keywords
- Anthropocene
- biopolitics
- postcolonialism
- visual culture
- visuality
- data manifestation