Digital Spectre: New Media Strategies for Imaging Nature

Debra Livingston

doi:10.25907/00570

This project considered digital photography and the three-dimensional medium to facilitate innovative modes of seeing to create awareness about our impact on nature. The theoretical research underpinning the creative project for this dissertation addresses the way we see images. In particular it considers how we have seen images of nature and how these modes of seeing may shape our future perspectives. The conceptual philosophy in this research is based on an investigation into how our perceptions have changed in line with evolving imaging technologies. To understand how we first came to see photographs of nature the author trialled the early cyanotype. Exposing plants to artificial light achieved a replica image of nature using much the same process as botanist Anna Atkins first did in the early nineteenth century. How this medium represented nature prior to the mechanisation of the camera obscura with its glass lens is important because it gave us the very first photographic image, which influenced future photographic methods. An important objective of this research was to experiment with some of the more recent photographic methods to highlight industrial impacts on nature and natural environments. In addition, how these technologies have changed our perceptions of nature was considered. Issues of ecological awareness also figure strongly in the creative research. It became evident that advancements in developing digital modes of seeing are creating idealised hyper-real images of nature using sophisticated computer software. Virtual environments re-created in the digital realm are becoming the familiar and often the preferred images of nature. This research also revealed that technology is becoming so highly developed that cameras will soon have the ability to image in three-dimensions that will advance the haptic dimensions of images to a similar degree the Kodak photographic process did in the twentieth century. In order to motivate this premise the author developed via photography, a holographic exhibition that communicated a postapocalyptic perception of the potential effects our post-industrial economy has on our ideas of the natural environment. The final creative work further presents nature through photographing objects painted with the light emitted from a small laser pointer, and using a commercial holographic viewer to see the three-dimensional effect. This process traced the changes in our perceptions of nature beginning with natural sunlight directly exposing chemicals; to light exposing film; then to light translated into coloured pixels; and finally to the generated light spectrum of virtual and holographic images.

Digital Spectre: New Media Strategies for Imaging Nature

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Details

Metrics