Climate Mimesis: Copy and Contact in Climate Model Visualisations

• In Event: Technoscience, Aesthetics, and the Senses - I

Abstract

In this presentation I address the problem of making palpable the results of climate science, by bringing the Frankfurt School aesthetic notion of mimesis to bear on climate visualisations. As one of the main visible faces of climate science, climate visualisations are already aesthetic objects. This observation opens them up to aesthetic critique for, say, their apparent transparency or their distancing earth-from-space perspective. I turn to mimesis because, in Frankfurt School thought, it seems to promise a way around the kinds of distancing vision that climate science imagery might encourage. Mimesis promises a subjective yielding to nature, in which the subject’s thought takes on the form of the object without prior conceptual determination. In Michael Taussig’s account, mimesis is a bodily capacity, involving imitation as well as physical contact. At a technical level, both of these aspects of mimesis are present in climate visualisations—imitation through the virtual modelling of physical processes, and contact through the incorporation of technical observations. This presentation explores ways, both theoretical and creative, in which these aspects of climate visualisations can be made palpable to the viewing subject. This means taking a lead from Walter Benjamin, who saw, in earlier, photographic forms of technical imagery, the promise of a reinvention of the aesthetics of contact beyond the immediate sensation. It also means interpreting, recasting or reframing climate visualisations to emphasise their ‘bodily’ or ‘contactual’ aspects. This presentation will combine elements of theoretical seminar with a performed juxtaposition of climate imagery and spoken text.

Author

• Tim Corballis, Centre for Science in Society, Victoria University of Wellington