Azzara M VtP Analytic on Imagined Toxic Futures
This visualization says that toxics are often purposely rendered invisible through discourse and imaginaries around places.
This visualization says that toxics are often purposely rendered invisible through discourse and imaginaries around places.
This visualization represents toxicity imbricated in language based on text from a fact sheet. What is quite unique here is the representation of past, present, and future through language. As the author indicates, the images and its text description depict how toxic imaginaries can be shaped and transformed to represent‚or rather fabricate— future ideas detached from their toxic realities.
I think that the image and its composition are a very creative communication tool, however, it is not clear what words are at first sight. Maybe dividing the vocabulary inventory and allocating part of it in the top left corner and right-bottom would allow the author to have more space well distributed with legible words.
This is an original image created by the author, composed of highlighted words from a fact sheet report. The vocabulary indicates words separated into three color-coded categories each denoting a past-present-future imaginary about toxicity. I found it interesting how the author used the red color for representing the toxic past, blue for the present, and green for as a promising future. The designed visualization is diagonally shaped with the use of different sized lines, with small and big words interlaced among them, which can represent how history is built about toxicity.
The visualization tells us the fourth-part of a story about a toxic place, which aims to change its historical past marked by war-era toxicity through a renewed narrative detached from its toxic past. However, other narratives emerging from local activists put into consideration the untold history in the new development planning. Therefore, the visualization shows us a constructed reality of toxicity, with different representations and imaginaries through time.
This visualization creates a temporary toxicity inventory in Pasadena, California. Based on a series of documents, the author illustrates how the discursive practices that make toxicity or the slogan invisible in the distant past can be visually intervened. This intervention illuminates what was erased or circumscribed to the past, transforming it into a colorful visual representation of the (lineal) temporalities of toxicity.
Reading the caption, I was reminded of a book I recently read, "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being" by Christina Sharpe. I would recommend revising it to think further and perhaps conceptualize the visual practice of annotation and redaction. I am particularly thinking of chapter 4, section Black Annotation and Black Redaction. In that sense, I would recommend using the caption to think/reflect on the visual intervention itself, not only to address what it reveals about the temporality of toxics but also about visualization as an ethnographic practice.
The quality of the image can be improved, and the font can be bigger. I would also invite the author to complicate the visualization of temporality —how to complicate the linear representation of time?
The caption does great work to show the ethnographic richness of the visual -- I am wondering how it could be combined or contrasted with other visuals. Shahab's map of "prinicipal problem areas" in Washington DC could make for an interesting pair!
This visualization shows how efforts to combat, redress, and prevent the contamination of landscapes can become entangled with/index other forms of social toxicity. In this case, the toxin is white supremacy. The recreation-based struggle to preserve public lands from contamination with fossil fuels simultaneously participates in the exclusion and further subjugation of native populations in the area.