Fleshing out some ideas for a series, here’s a recent Cintiq sketch with 100 years of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation run through d3.
I think of the activity we call science as a somatosensory extension, some enhanced and self-directed intelligence beginning when the first person wondered about the night sky or was no longer content with the information afforded to them through five basic senses and a singular, isolated human experience. I wonder about some different way of being where the external clunkiness of instrumentation were suddenly supplanted by a visceral ability to feel every cold front, see ultraviolet wavelength, and hear the shift and crack of icebergs hundreds of miles away.
I wonder if we’d have any different perspective of our actions, in this vivid and immediate landscape, or if a hardwired tendency to spare ourselves threat salience would still override our perception even with ten, twenty, or one hundred ways to experience a lushly tapestried world of information.
This is why I work in science media, to contribute whatever small part I am able in healing and retelling this story. It’s never seemed anything but vastly awash in immediacy to me, a world full of pattern and complexity and self-organizing intelligence, of centuries-long interwoven trajectories of fucking and fighting and adaptation set before the one background high note of all life and proliferation on earth, an unequivocally resounding *yes*. I do the best I can to share that perspective well, and am always looking to improve.
