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As other, a non-white viewer looking on, in awe, and in condemnation. 

If overlayed upon each other, the collage would acquire more texture. As is, the collage is flat and does not evoke the sedimented layers that these toxic people, across toxic places and periods, are implicated in.

This image made me recoil at first glance; I had a rather visceral reaction to it. Visually speaking, it may be more effective to have the more "active" images placed more strategically in the image.

What does it mean to characterize people or behavior as "toxic"?This image makes me curious about the capacity and limits of toxicity as an analytical category applied to people. Characterize sunshine-based California boosterism as a "toxic" effort to claim exclusive land rights makes me think of Lisa Park and David Pellow's critique of "nativist environmentalism" in Aspen (The Slums of Aspen, 2011).

As you identify in the last bullet of your design statement, "the simplicification of ontology has led to the enormous complication of epistemology." As with your "Toxic Family Tree" visualization, I wonder how one might demystify the content of this visual so that it's also more legible to non-specialists. As a historian, you might already know the ongoing debates within and objectives of digital humanities. To this end, I ask, how does this image make legible information, knowledge, or insight that is otherwise impossible to articule? 

This artifact closely remembles imaging of galaxies/cosmos (as I would suspect the creator of the image might have intended, or at least identified.) The beauty of these molecular constellations reframes concepts of toxicity - something that is visually appealing might obfuscate an underlying toxicity. 

As with one my of previous comments, how can one alter the legend of the image so that the content is clearer to the non-specialist observer? 

This collage invites us to contemplate how toxicity sits in places. The image of the woman in the freeway headdress reminds us that the managing of toxicity is a burdensome act which requires careful balancing and distribution of weight. Her arms reach out on either side and her weight is spread across her shifted stance. The collage ponders what factors shape how toxicity is balanced, that is how it is spread across places.

This image is a visual collection of the ways that artists have "art-washed" toxic spaces. It serves an ethnographic purpose in representing the motivations and outcomes of artists' desires to reappropriate toxicity. I felt that the image of the freeway headdress and the drain cats were particularly effective in this regards. It was more difficult for me to make the same connection to the argument for the other images.

That floral freeway headdress: what an image! I read this as a celebration of constriction: the visible demands that this absurd headdress exerts upon the body and mind of the woman modeling it, the knot of freeway overpasses and underpasses, the snarl of traffic. Is the aestheticization of these multiple levels of constriction perhaps an act of cultural self-justification and defense against critique?We ("we") southern Californians circa 1962, the argument might go, we bear up so gracefully under the pressures of self-presentation and built environment and mobility.