Textual Afterlives
Similarly, this project asks: How do these afterlives manifest in art? If coal, oil, and nuclear energy are indeed inextricably linked to our everyday lives, then they must also appear in cultural artifacts, even those that aren’t explicitly about energy. They exist in the texts and objects we create even if we don’t consciously register their presence.
In this exercise, students collected and visualized data related to energy’s afterlives in art. It is an experiment in seeing how deep and wide these connections go, how they inform our imagination, and how energy generates art in content and form.
