Viral Visualities
Topics:
Keywords: viruses, visualization, ontology
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Deborah P Dixon, University of Glasgow
JP Jones, University of Arizona
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Abstract
Viral research explicitly attends to an ontology of viral matter, proclaiming since the 19th century a viral world that lies beyond the sensing, thinking and feeling human being; a knowing figure that nevertheless partitions what is apprehended and what is not through a rapidly homogenising scientific method and technologies, to be sure, but also through fast congealing modes of visualisation. In the process, viral studies enact their own partitioning of the Earth via experimental designs that map and delineate, infer and indicate, the nature of a viral matter that reaches across into human horizons and, importantly, can thus be traced back from the site of infection into the inhuman. What emerges from such work is a cohering viral world - sundered from any other viral world that it animates - which subsumes difference into that which is known and that which is currently elusive but is hopefully to become (via further experimentation) known and visualisable. Inside the shifting confines of the viral world, hopes and fears around a human life flourish, all dependent upon a mode of knowing/visualising that is itself conflated with sustained curiosity and even creativity.
Unpacking a series of visualisations of ‘Zika’, we note how these infer and confer particular capacities for work in the world that can produce coherent matter. In particular investigate a lineage of visualisations that portrays an ontology of becoming that can be harnessed within the observational timespan of human beings.
Viral Visualities
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Paper Abstract