ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, and climate breakdown. It explores a range of leading and emerging voices, drawn from a diversity of disciplinary and geographical vantage points, and provides new cutting-edge ecocritical research. The book provides a vital site of intervention, complementary and alternative to the earth sciences, engineering, design, and economics, which have popularly defined climate-change discourse and policy. The book describes the importance of including art and visual culture within the discussion of ecological matters of concern, in order both to critically assess the representational politics of climate transformation as they have recently unfolded and currently exist, and to highlight creative and experimental practices beyond the techno-scientific, apocalyptic, positivistic and/or spectacular media and pop-cultural image systems through which climate breakdown is so often experienced and visualized.
