As a visual anthropologist, I am interested in exploring the aesthetics of toxicity across a range of environmental and political contexts. What are cross-cultural and culturally specific visual conventions for representing and conveying toxicity? How do we come to visually apprehend toxicity? How too does the visual work with other sensory modes through which we apprehend and confront toxicity? I propose to explore the aesthetics of toxicity in the following sites: graphic signs that signal danger and toxicity, documentary photographs of heavy metal sludge, and depictions of Shiva’s throat in Hindu iconography. For example, the respective yellow, red, and black color palettes of danger signs, as compared to the shiny metallic colors of photojournalistic images of metal waste, and the use of blue to signify poison in Hindu devotional imagery point to differentiations in visualizations of toxicity across forms and contexts. I seek to work with a found images of design blueprints of danger signs, WhatsApp forwards of Hindu imagery, and created images of metal sludge from a film I shot at an iron foundry to understand the relationship the range of visual conventions of toxicity. In thinking through the aesthetics of toxicity across the images that participants in the design project contribute and annotate, I am keen to think about whether and what kind of toxic aesthetic emerges across our visualizations.
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