Hugo Almeida
Research project
New Natural: Appropriating evolutionary discourse for multi-level narration in comics
Project summary
Evolution presents a challenge of representation in that it surpasses human perception. The narrative models that dominate media, which cannot capture the slowness and complexity of such natural processes, further hinder our comprehension of evolutionary processes. In contrast, scientific literature has developed specific visual mechanisms to represent evolutionary phenomena.
This application proposes an artistic study on visual narratives of evolution, by studying and appropriating the devices and aesthetics of scientific evolutionary discourse. The outcome of this project will be a comic book that will explore diagrammatic forms in order to expand the possibilities of narrative signification. It is expected that this book will overall capture the trial, error and endless derivation that are characteristic of evolution. As its main subject, the book will consider human activity, such as economics and culture, as environmental agents that drive evolutionary change, thus creating a “new natural”. These interactions will be addressed through scenarios in which biota have been disrupted by human activity, or through wholly artificial environments where communities of organisms are able to thrive.
The comic book will be separated in chapters, which will integrate the different perceptual levels at which biological change occurs, from the molecular events that drive morphological development, to variations in the composition of populations of whole organisms that lead to speciation.
