Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich and epidemiologist David S. Jones trace the imagery of waves in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, examining how the mixed imagery of wave and curve points to a kind of double social meaning for recent epidemic graphics. The seeming simplicity of the wave image is infused with moral messaging, animating a mix of resolve, fear, and reassurance. The wave graphic functions as both an emblem of power and anticipated terror, kind of anticipatory solace, an indication of what a collective can achieve if it acts wisely. Designer asnd design historian Gabi Schaffzin infuses the account of the maritime setting and inspiration for the pandemic wave metaphor put into perspective by Helmreich and Jones with an account of the history of hydropolitical forms in graphic design in a transnational context with an emphasis on the present form of subjugated waves, the pandemic numbers propogated below the surface of hyper-mediated graphics. The medical geographies of nascent epidemiology are overlaid with what the authors refer to as medical oceanographies, which are animated by visual systems that reinforce a sense of epidemics as natural processes washing over peoples and polities. This contribution grapples with the complexity of wave language and imagery in order to provoke the scientific and political history of epidemiology to think critically and creatively about whose and which stories are told, and which are submerged.
Background image: Still from SIO Hydraulics Lab Breaking Wave video, 2018.
