Virtuality and Nature’s Digital Spectre

The author’s studio practice is concerned with strategies to facilitate innovative modes of seeing to increase awareness of human impact on nature. The conceptual ideas for the work evolved through exploration into how we see images through photographic and cinematic frameworks that represents our world in general. The paper considers how this shapes our vision of the world—importantly how we use aesthetics in ‘new’ media—and how technological advancements present the simulated image in the virtual environment. The creative work uses photography as the medium: firstly, to explore the effectiveness of the cyber-hologram, and to simulate a virtual experience relating to human transformation of nature-scapes and nature’s resilience to technology. Secondly, it explores the distinction between artificial modes of viewing nature and seeing the natural world. Finally, the author’s images act as metaphors to illustrate the changes in our perceptions of nature by positioning the everyday flower into the future echoing a past ecology as a distant memory, reflecting back via a virtual mirror image, a post eco-apocalyptic view of global warming and changed natural systems. The images presented demonstrate the importance to what Jung (1964) suggests is for the ‘ecologization of technology’, relating to the need for balance with nature and our industrialised world. Virtual space is increasingly changing the way we view images, creating a fundamental ontological shift in our visual constructions of what we call reality. Virtual spaces have the ability to transport the viewer/user into a totally self-contained ‘other’ world that requires no reference to actuality