Hugo Almeida

This application describes a project focusing on evolutionary discourse as a starting point for artistic research in comics. Specifically, it aims to engage with forms of communicating the slow, multifactorial and complex phenomena of evolution, which are seldom considered in quotidian experience or successfully represented in fiction. The project will take the form of a comic book and it may be described as an experimental speculative fiction, which will reflect on the consequences of human activity to evolutionary processes. Evolution, or the changes in heritable traits of populations over time, presents a problem of representation, in that it dwarfs human experience of time and causality. The ability to represent and reflect on evolution has become a critical skill, as societies must now cope with the long-term effects of human activity on biodiversity, and their ability to interfere with natural systems at the planetary scale (Steffen et al., 2007; Quintero and Wiens, 2013). However, the present structure of media representation obscures the processes of evolution: we are surrounded by linear narratives involving singular characters that act on motivation. The scope of interactions in evolutionary processes requires a focus on populations instead of characters, fields of possibilities instead of singular motivated actions, and networked, feedbacking chains of causality instead of purely linear sequences of events. These challenges of representation have been the exclusive concern of scientific literature, which routinely uses verbal and visual rhetoric to discuss evolutionary phenomena. For the natural sciences, evolution functions as a framework to produce meaningful narratives out of discrete data (Almeida, 2015). This process is aided by specialized visual vocabulary, which organizes data into perceptible images (Lemke, 1998). My previous theoretical work investigates how narrative emerges in an evolutionary diagram composed of sequences of images, a form that is superficially close to the conventions of comics (Almeida, 2015). However, scientific discourse includes many other visual devices to present information, including abstract forms of representation, such as graphs, that radically deviate from the traditional devices of comics.