How do artists and writers engage with environmental knowledge in the face of overwhelming information about catastrophe? What kinds of knowledge do the arts produce when addressing climate change, extinction, and other environmental emergencies? What happens to scientific data when it becomes art? In Infowhelm, Heather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in an age of climate crisis and information overload. Houser argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises. Infowhelm analyzes how artists transform the techniques of the sciences into aesthetic material, repurposing data on everything from butterfly migration to oil spills and experimenting with data collection, classification, and remote sensing. Houser traces how artists ranging from novelist Barbara Kingsolver to digital memorialist Maya Lin rework knowledge traditions native to the sciences, entangling data with embodiment, quantification with speculation, precision with ambiguity, and observation with feeling. Their works provide new ways of understanding environmental change while also questioning traditional distinctions between types of knowledge. Bridging the environmental humanities, digital media studies, and science and technology studies, this timely book reveals the importance of artistic medium and form to understanding environmental issues and challenges our assumptions about how people arrive at and respond to environmental knowledge.

Amelia Bedelia, the housekeeper with a literal mind, merrily upsets the household when she "dresses" the chicken and "trims" the steak with ribbons and lace.

THE STORY: At Peter and Rita's wedding, a mysterious old man insists on kissing the bride. While honeymooning, Peter gradually realizes that the woman by his side is not his wife. The wedding kiss caused Rita's soul and the old man's to change plac

A vividly rendered collection tracing the aftermath of a breakdown and the struggle to reconnect with the realities of daily life. In the manner of a poetic meditation, Square Inch Hours draws on elements from fiction, memoir, daybook, and reverie, piecing together moments that follow in the aftermath of a breakdown. Writing from an area outside psychology or personal history, the intensely solitary speaker relates the experience of reengaging with the world. With an adamant attentiveness, he turns his focus to observing reality in its minutest particulars: the expression on the face of a random passerby; the palsied hand of a grocery clerk; copulating flies on a windowsill; a deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door. How he perceives is how he reconnects. The title, Square Inch Hours, expresses that impulse to capture each moment, as in the square of a photograph.