Data plus affect: interspecific accommodation in the models of art

This chapter examines three projects by artist duo Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson: You Must Carry Me Now from 2015, Matrix (2016), and Visitations, begun in 2019 and to conclude in the autumn of 2021. Each project, in its own way addresses or accommodates central themes of this volume: the social agency, meaning, and affective force embodied in the material realities of animal remains and in their cultural afterlives. Each project has at its heart, traces and remains of animal bodies—avian cadavers, teeth, bones, or the traces of structures animals make, within which new lives once began. Within a context of crisis—of mass extinction, the Anthropocene, and global warming, artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson consider and practise art as a tool of disruption, provocation, and mediation in their efforts to reimagine environmental relationships and behaviour. Their diffractive practice—the act of passing subjects and approaches, wave-like, through each other, in an interdisciplinary and multi-sourced approach—is a strategy they implement in order to make complexity and contradictions in human environmental practice, simultaneously less hidden, more porous and mutable. In this respect, within these three projects, they explore the “sites” of interspecific discord and tensions between practices of hunting, of science, conservation, tourism, and “tradition” at a variety of sites in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, in Kaktovík, the North Slope Borough, Alaska, and on the north coast of Iceland.