Overwhelming [2023]
An interactive map exploring the complexity of climate conversation by Xavier Mosere-Storms
Introduction
Overwhelming [2023] as a project started off as an exploration of emotional reactions I had experienced when discussing climate change throughout my twenty six years of life - both within this class and outside of it. Showcasing this sort of emotional journey was a challenge that I wanted to take on, but realized that a lot of artists like Rose B. Simpson, Edward Burtynsky, and Olafur Eliasson have already done so!
So my challenge morphed into something new: how do I place a personal twist on this? After furthering my research and looking at different methods of exploring climate-focused emotions and stumbling across interactive maps displaying climate-centered data - I landed on the desire to create an interactive digital map using ArcGIS.
A secondary goal of this work was to encourage you guys to interact with the Ecollective website as a whole. Looking at Overwhelming can be… very overwhelming - and this can easily lead to the viewers seeking out a way to combat these emotions and find ways that they can work through them. Ecollective as a whole provides a space in which you can engage with the way my fellow classmates worked through their feelings/ideas/etc in a productive way and the resources they had come across.
Ghostly Inspiration 💡
So.
How did I start my map making journey?
When starting out, I struggled with figuring out what area of the world I wanted to focus the outline of my map within. I came across Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. In the chapter titled Ghost Forms and Forest History, Lowenhaupt talks about the chestnut and pine forests of Monti Pisani in Italy, and dives into the fact that while the forest may not be a participant in the economic systems we have created and exist outside of the city - there are still traces of human use throughout the entirety of the forest.
This outright example of the damages to a land that humans view as removed from us felt like it was a perfect foundation of what I wanted to bring to light through my project. The idea that no matter how far removed or blind we are from the damages humanity is causing to the climate, there is still physical evidence of it. This chapter also allowed me to let go a bit and learn that narrowing my map outline down to a specific location did not mean that all of the information I was presenting had to be directly related to the location I chose.
As the focus of my project was to expand upon and showcase the importance of interacting with feelings that come up in climate conversation, I could use the location on the map as more of a conversational piece to showcase that denialism and grief creates consequences that spread all throughout the planet no matter the map was was centered in.
“I have been tracing the ghostly forms that have emerged from past encounters between people, plants, animals, and soils. These ghostly forms are traces of past cultivation, but they also provide ways of imagining and perhaps bringing into being positive environmental futures.”
(Tsing et al. 2017)
(Fig. 1)
(Fig. 2)
(Fig. 3)
(Fig. 4)
In a similar vein to The Art of Living on a Damaged planet, the first pieces of artwork that helped me centralize my project were Oil Fields #2 (Fig. 1) and Oil Fields #19ab (Fig. 2) by Edward Burtynsky as well as Ignacio Acosta’s work featured in Copper Geographies (Figures 3 & 4). Burtynskys’ two works are just a small portion of photos in a series of artworks that focus on oil itself as a source of energy and as a source of dread. Ignacio explored the global impact of copper mining through his series of work in Copper Geographies. Each of these photographic moments felt like they gave an artistic exploration to the topics of history being held within land that Arts of the Living on a Damaged Planet explored.
I appreciated how Edward was able to showcase the barren landscape surrounding oil production and the initial emotional gasp his work produced as you looked closer and closer at the source material. Through my own work, I wanted to take what Burtynsky and Ignacio did and encourage viewers to look closer and closer at the source material within my map. I wanted to elicit that initial shock as they realize that each segment of the map is filled with a different take on climate change, as Burtynsky's work caused in shifting the viewer's reaction to oil and Ignacio recontextualized and re-think copper.
(Fig. 5)
(Fig. 6)
Another piece of artwork that encouraged the interactive nature of my artwork was Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (Fig. 5). Eliasson did an amazing job of creating a work that entirely depended on participants' interaction to create meaning. Every single person's interaction with the ice altered it in a way that could not be reversed. In my own artistic project I wanted to emulate the necessity of public participation with Eliassons’ work as well as simulate through the map itself and the data presented that the damages we are creating are irreversible in many ways. If no one were to click through the map or engage in any of the sources, simply looking at the map would render it meaningless. Another work that emulated the necessity for people present within the artwork, was Lungiswas’ Lawn 1 (Fig. 6). Without the audience smelling and seeing the immense amount of petrol placed individually within the Coca Cola bottles, the work would lose a large part of its significance. In a way, I am hopeful that the map I have created through its formatting and interactive nature is able to create a similar response in people that watching the ice melt in front of each participant created and the sort of visceral reaction that Lawn 1 was able to solicit within the space.
Luxury: How Does it Relate to Climate?
In combination with the map's location itself and its need for the public’s participation, I also had to centralize a lot of my quotes, data, images and more around climate change itself. In my research, I came across Sustainable Luxury: Managing Social and Environmental Performance in Iconic Brands by Miguel Angel Gardetti through the Art Library. His work crafted another key way of looking at climate change for my project. Similar to how forests themselves were not going to be centralized in my map, neither were luxury brands or the fashion industry directly. However, I realized that while the book centers itself around luxury, it also speaks to the sort of denialism that occurs in spaces outside of climate.
Denialism is not just a problem that is faced within climate science.
Miguel’s introduction specifically dives into the fact that many consumers of luxury goods don’t think about the process in which they are created, where they are created, or who plays a role in manufacturing their products. This sort of outright ignorance or deliberate silence in response to the truly horrific ways in which people are exploited within the luxury industry gave me insight into the very similar ways that people continue to extract luxuries from Earth while denying outright the damages these lifestyles can cause. To enjoy their luxury goods comes at the cost of denial of slave labor and factory conditions - just as the denial of climate change allows us to enjoy our current extractive lifestyle.
This sort of conversation around luxury fueled me to reconsider some of the data I had gathered and ensure that I was focusing on the ways in which denialism - especially within climate change - shows up through a complex and interconnected way.
Applying Creativity to Climate Change
Now, when it came to the emotional responses I wanted to elicit and the topics that inspired this project in the first place - I can’t forget to talk about WITH APPLIED CREATIVITY, WE CAN HEAL: Permaculture and Indigenous Futurism at Santa Clara Pueblo surrounding the conversation between Jessica L. Horton and Rose B. Simpson. Through this reading I was introduced for the first time to the idea of Climate Denial and Climate Grief - two topics that I had not put terms to before and have referenced freely throughout this paper. Simpson’s approach to understanding why people the way they do in regards to climate change and its relation to Miguel’s dive into denialism within luxury products created a platform in which I approached gathering climate data.
One quote of hers that I felt really pieced together my project was…
“Denial felt rampant. As a child, it was a denial to not want to eat fast food when I saw everyone else doing it… But I couldn’t deny that eating my pet was a painful thing, that I knew how food came to be, that I knew what it took to create the things of our modern human life. It seemed that no-one else chose to know … I tried to understand why we, as modern humans, and as colonized Indigenous people, choose denial. To be aware of ourselves, and to notice the damage we cause every minute of every day, is a lot to feel. Shame. Fear. Hopelessness. We are not taught to look at these feelings, to hold ourselves accountable. Being a feeling thing is complex.”
(Simpson and Horton 2021).
Simpsons’ belief that humanity is not taught to look at these feelings and be held accountable for them, as well as the denial of these emotions themselves encouraged me to seek out a way in which people could - within a support space - explore their feelings and visually engage with them.
To gain a different look into climate grief and denialism, I sought out two additional readings outside of our class to deepen my understanding on how other disciplines were talking about climate change and its relationship to these complex topics. How Climate Change is Taught in America (Worth 2021) and Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018) were the two academic sources that brought another depth to my work.
(Fig. 7)
Erin Gaadimits Ivalu Gingrich’s installation from our class's in-artist visit helped fuel my desire to showcase resilience through my work. She does an amazing job depicting Salmon swimming upstream, and exploring the idea that no matter what challenges we - as humans - present to Salmon, at the end of the day they are going to continue to swim upstream. I used this method of artistic exploration to try and present within my own work the idea that no matter what sort of response we have to climate change - denial, anger, sadness, optimism, etc - the reality of what is going on is present and the planet is going to continue to adapt around us. Even at the cost of human lives. Not only has her work been integral to the formatting of my work, but her experience as someone who lives in Alaska and witnesses the changes that many people denied added a layer of understanding to my work.
Rifkin: Open Infrastructure
Jeremy Rifkin states that we are in the midst of a Third Industrial Revolution focusing on the digitization of the world in his work The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. The fact that our entire project was going to be a digital gallery featured on a website with free domain and access to resources meant that Rifkins' look into the Third Industrial Revolution provided a wonderful foundation to our work. While I feel that his optimism towards this digitized era was somewhat idealistic, I did feel that his hope for infrastructure to be designed for distribution rather than privatization encouraged our group to seek out the digital production of our project rather than a printable zine. However, since I felt that his look into the negative impacts of open access digitalization of infrastructure were limiting, I wanted to showcase the idea that having everyone being able to publicly access information and post their own content to a network also had negative consequences.
Through my inclusion of questionable sources like Fox and Friends or Donald Trump throughout the map, I wanted to push on Rifkins idea of only helpful information and infrastructure resulting from this open access. As we have seen even within social media sites alone - like Twitter and Youtube - there is the possibility for extremist views and groups to gain traction and create a space for themselves and silence integral voices.
As well as the fact that an open and transparent infrastructure is an amazing concept, I also wanted to showcase through my map how overwhelming having access to so many networks can be for an individual. Having a system that he is proposing within technological infrastructure requires a very complex and time consuming relationship between individuals and the network. To be a part of something that is so regenerative and reliant on the individual - like Rifkins reimagination of buildings/networks/etc. - likely requires a lot of participation. I feel as though my map tries to showcase how easily one can become overwhelmed on a scale much more narrow and specific - like climate change. Imagining how exhausted or full of complex emotions someone can become when looking at an entirely digitized society full of millions of voices is something that I wanted to explore in my work.
“The Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, by contrast, is designed
to be distributed rather than centralized. It performs best if it remains open
and transparent, rather than privatized, to optimize the network effect.”
(Rifkin 2022)
“In the coming era, buildings will be retrofitted for energy savings and
climate resilience and embedded with JoT infrastructure. They will also be
equipped with edge data centers, giving the public direct control over how
their data is collected, used, and shared.”
(Rifkin 2022)
To wrap up my project, I looked back on the feedback that we were given after our presentations. I realized that for my map project to have more of an impact on the viewers - I think there needs to be more integration of artworks and artists. I had spent so much time making sure that I incorporated a wide variety of headlines, quotes, and videos into the project that I lost sight of the importance of artists. If this map were a stand alone project, I feel that the exclusion of artwork would completely destroy the goal of my project, and the only saving grace is the fact that my piece is within an art heavy gallery where many can seek out creative outlets through the Ecollective website.
As well as the need for more artists through the map itself, I heard from my classmates an idea that has completely changed how I want to expand upon this project outside of this class. They commented on the discussion and proposed the idea of including an additional map that encompasses the entire world and places each artist where they come from as well as grassroots organizations and the impact climate change has had on these areas. I feel that this idea itself is another project in and of itself, but it adds another layer to the project while sticking to my goal of showcasing climate denialism and grief while providing an avenue for hope. As well as this idea, I heard from Jinyoung Lee that including a more specified location in my map as well as addressing which countries are experiencing the most damage from climate change would add a clarification to the project that I was lacking.
Overall, I feel that this project was a wonderful first step into exploring and showcasing climate denialism and climate grief within my own life, and hope to create more projects that express these ideas in a more clear and artistic way.
Academic Sources
Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. 2018. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss.” Nature Climate Change 8 (4): 275–81. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Miguel Ángel Gardetti, and Ana Laura Torres. 2015. Sustainable Luxury : Managing Social and Environmental Performance in Iconic Brands. Sheffield, Uk: Greenleaf Publishing.
Rifkin, Jeremy. 2022. The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. St. Martin’s Press.
Simpson, Rose , and Jessica Horton. 2021. “‘With Applied Creativity, We Can Heal’ Permaculture and Indigenous Futurism at Santa Clara Pueblo.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by Emily Scott and Subhankar Banerjee, 311–20. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts of the Anthropocene ; Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Worth, Katie. 2021. Miseducation : How Climate Change Is Taught in America. New York, Ny: Columbia Global Reports.
Artist Images
Figure #1: Oil Fields #2, Edward Burtynsky, Belridge, California, USA, 2003 Digital chromogenic color print
Figure #2: Oil Fields #19ab, Edward Burtynsky, Belridge, California, USA, 2003 Digital chromogenic color print
Figure #3: Copper Geographies, Ignacio Acosta, 2012-2016, Eucalyptus trees contaminated by irrigation water residues from Los Pelambres copper mine, Los Vilos
Figure #4: Copper Geographies, Ignacio Acosta, 2012-2016, Satellite views of Chuquicamata corporate mining town. Atacama Desert, Chile, c. 2011
Figure #5: Ice Watch, Olafur Eliasson, 2014, ice sculpture Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015
Figure #6: Lawn 1, Lungiswa Gqunta, 2016, Galata Greek Primary School Physical Dimensions: 25.5 x 484 x 366 cm, Wood Instillation, 4000 broken Coca Cola glass bottles, petrol, ink
Figure #7: Kuukmiñ ~ from river, Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich, carving installation and spoken word poem, 2023