Nature – Technology project, Tom Clark, 2010
Nature, Landscape and Technology
Experience and Origin
Our view of nature is irrevocably bound to a romantic idea of Landscape: something to be looked upon, and increasingly through and mediated by digital technology.
Today, we are more likely to experience the digital or cultural sublime rather than any original and vital experience of the natural world. As technology (particularly visually mediating) becomes further integrated into contemporary experience, the divide between actual and representational becomes increasingly blurred.
What then is an origin? Can there be a truly (Kantian) sublime experience, particularly given the popularity of adventure-leisure: especially as these activities are commercialized, spectactularized and competitive, whilst claiming to offer an ever realer experience.
As the ‘experience’ of nature becomes increasingly mediated, digital technology is used to create ever more ‘real’/believable virtual versions of nature in computer games, big-budget CGI in Hollywood movies and increasingly exciting representations in documentaries.
This engenders a double looping of abstraction and confusion as potentially nostalgic and already ideologically predetermined ideas of nature are re-mediated through exponentially effective and invasive technological mimesis.
The question of origin also applies to the understanding of digital technology itself: the belief in the truth and reproducibility of a digital file which, with no tangible existence, has no apparent origin (in an analogue sense) making it mutable, corruptible and available for appropriation.
Where, when the visual experience is only a visualization of data that has no physical providence, does the origin, or ‘real experience’ of digital visual forms exist?
The works in this project seek to make clear these concerns in the forms they exist in culturally through appropriation and re-positioning; using the means by which they were created in the first place.
