(Some loose rambly thoughts that I will flesh out this week)
I think there are a few different directions projects could go this year in my practice around the idea of reimagining, exploring, documenting or constructing environments - one I was thinking about this weekend, and which goes back to some thoughts from Year 1 of my BFA, is the idea of botanic garden spaces being a kind of augmented environment, technically "natural" but heavily designed and organised. The spaces always feel a little bizarre to me - there's a mix of curiosity and paradox; I'm conscious that many of the plants that grow in them are not native to Aotearoa, or would often not be alongside each other in a non-curated environment (examples of this that comes to mind are cactus gardens, greenhouses, etc.), yet I go to them to get into nature or to escape from the city for a little bit (even if they're within the city). They are ordered bubbles where the construction and consumption of the natural world can take place.
I don't think this is inherently a negative thing; I think it very much depends on the context and intent behind their order - having experimented with installation and virtual reality work for some time now, I believe strongly that authentic experiences can be had within "unreal" environments. For many of the public parks in Auckland, there is a very heavy settler-colonial history present; in Western Park I remember seeing a sign detailing one settler's letter home in which they describe the "unappealing" native plants being replaced by aesthetically pleasing British varieties. Similarly, when I was in Rotorua recently I came across a plaque in Kuirau Park detailing the "beautification" and reformatting of nature that needed to take place to make a "natural" space tolerable. The idea of nature needing to be tended and structured in order to be palatable isn't new and historically has been an element of colonialism, but I think the construction of the natural world around us, especially those of us who live in city environments, is often overlooked or unseen.
What elements of "nature" do we decide to share? Is it only the picturesque parts, or do we include the not so postcard-worthy too? Do we include the parts where human impact is visible, or do we choose to focus on utopian ideals? What ideals are we perpetuating in the choices we make, and how does digital media or mediation shape our perception of the world? Does it matter? What signs and meanings are we trying to convey? And in doing so, are we acknowledging ourselves as part of the ecosystem or are we looking in as observers in a subject-object relationship? I don't think the critique of these environments is what I want to focus on at present, I'm certainly not knowledgeable or eloquent enough to comment on the historical and cultural implications of these spaces with any certainty right now, but I am very curious about how we construct these spaces, the history behind them, and how we view the concept of "nature" when we live in a hypermediated world.
An image of the thing but not the thing itself
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.
- Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Last week in looking at Emily Simek's work, I came across an interview where she discusses the difference between experiencing a work and documenting a work. While her comments related to the topic of digital sculpture, I think this idea around experience and semiotics can be applied to the idea of documenting in general - data and recording are one piece of the puzzle but are not the whole story. This weekend some classmates and I went to the Domain for a catchup and spent some time in the Wintergardens area. I took the opportunity to take some more scans of the fern forest there, which I then combined with previously gathered film footage (close-up of plants from my flat's garden, Orakei water clips) and sculpted objects from Blender tutorials (specifically succulent plants, created when playing with golden ratios and nodes). I included some text overlay of a small diary entry I made when thinking about the space, and created a hybrid digital environment by combining them in Blender (in hindsight, I would've liked to include some sound as well, but I couldn't find the file I was looking for at the time and wanted to keep the experiment short). This was partially to keep experimenting with the tools I've been learning, and partially to explore this form of visual assemblage and the idea of constructed or mediated realities.
The result is quite ugly to me and looks almost parody-like in terms of being a very bad digital copy, but I'm curious about the possibilities of this kind of format. My intention here is not to copy or perfectly represent spaces, but to explore their construction, assemblage and the layered information that comes from experiencing an environment. I am thinking about how digital documentation also creates a digital landscape or ecology of information that shapes the perception of a place, and the fragmented elements that go into forming an understanding of the world and the world itself...
(The text was added very much as a stylistic element, the writing itself isn't too important to the clip - here is a version without it. If you right-click on them, you can select "loop" to play them continuously in the browser)
A random interesting find: NDIVIA's gauGAN2 AI continues to advance and develop rapidly - gauGAN2 is a drawing program that I came across a month or two ago and which terrifies me a little bit! It could be seen as an example of human-machine collaboration in painting/drawing/composition, and it allows users to create images of natural environments through AI alone, building them from either text descriptions or selected images.
"GauGAN2, named after post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, creates photorealistic images from segmentation maps, which are labelled sketches that depict the layout of a scene. Artists can use text, a paintbrush and paint bucket tools, or both methods to design their own landscapes. A style transfer algorithm allows creators to apply filters — changing a daytime scene to sunset, or a photorealistic image to a painting. Users can even upload their own filters to layer onto their masterpieces, or upload custom segmentation maps and landscape images as a foundation
for their artwork."
This is not something I have an interest in using, but the implications of this kind of technology are worth thinking about, I think.
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