Counter-mapping Big Data and species precarity through drawing

Abstract

Drawing has a particular creative capacity to hold and communicate complex ideas, through the visual and the performative. The gestural acts of marking coalesce with information and research as well as speculations, provocations, propositions, and ideas that are cultural and political.

In my work I explore how drawing, as a practice of investigation and learning is a mode for commentary and dissemination on Big Data and species extinction that differs from the didactic nature of technoscientific research reporting. Mapping Extinction is a collection of drawings that use different bodies of data to counter-map species loss across global contexts: The impacts of the Australian bushfires in 2019-2020 on native biodiversity loss and the ongoing impacts of land clearing and development in the United Kingdom, on native wildlife. My experimental approach critically extracts Big Data statistics on extinction and counter-maps the vulnerability of species lesser known by the public to accentuate the plight of 'minor figures' of British and Australian native wildlife, including insects, reptiles, molluscs and small mammals. Mapping Extinction examinations multispecies civics and the cultural politics of extinction.