Natural Habitat 4.11.- 17.12. Montevideo, Amsterdam (NL)

In the Natural Habitat project artists are working at the interface of nature and technology. Here they investigate the extent to which nature and technology complement each other, and whether a distinction can be made between what is natural and what is technology. In Natural Habitat the boundaries between nature, culture and technology become increasingly blurred.

Natural Habitat consists of an exhibition and a seminar
For more information about the seminar: Art and Science in their Natural Habitat

Background
In our environment today nature is ever less natural, and applications of technology are ever more natural. The way that our industrialized world deals with nature is based on technological control and scientific analysis. In this context it is not surprising that the expression ‘disposable landscape’ is being heard with increasing frequency in The Netherlands, and one also hears of a ‘cultivated landscape’. The message is clear: the landscape is subject to continuous change as a consequence of human interventions, making it ever more difficult for one to relate to that landscape. Pure or untouched nature is something which is found only in our imagination any more. In the publication Next Nature by Mieke Gerritzen and Koert van Mensvoort, Michiel Schwarz correctly asserts that the question ‘what is nature?’ is no longer relevant, and must be replaced with the question ‘how do we relate to nature?’. ‘In the age where we have genetic engineering, artificial beaches, nature-identical food flavorings and virtual environments, what we traditionally used to view as 'nature' has now become an object of human design. 'So-called nature' has become a culturally-constructed nature in a mediated world. In this world, it is perhaps fitting that we now manipulate not only what we believed to be nature, but we happily also manipulate our images of nature... What the images of multiple natures reveal to us, then, is the 'new ecology' in which we now find ourselves. A new ecology, where natures, technologies and media are all caught up together.’ He concludes his argument with the question, ‘What sort of nature do we want?’
Only a small group of artists shared an ecological consciousness in art in the 1960s. Artists involved in what was called the Land Art movement placed the relation between man, nature and the environment at the heart of their work. Presently this discourse has reached far beyond the narrow confines of art, and the framework in which we regard the natural environment, and its boundaries, has become an important point for discussion within the cultivated urban milieu throughout the Western world, and certainly in The Netherlands. In art too reflection on nature from purely aesthetic grounds, or from an intrinsic art value, has become passé. With the developments in digital culture and research by artists into artificial life and its expressions, traditional and humanist ideas about nature are being revised.

The exhibition

Artists respond in various ways to the influence of technology on nature. Sometimes they play with our feeling of nostalgia for an idealized pre-industrial era in which man and nature lived harmoniously alongside and with each other. It is a desire for virgin nature that we can really only find any more – skillfully packaged – in amusement parks, zoos and other theme parks where nature is made natural. The imitation of wild nature, the taming of nature and the extension of nature are important points of departure for these artists. By these means they try to return nature – the power and existence of which we hardly recognize any more – to our environment. Beside that, there is attention for nature as science, in which processes of change play a large role. Artists focus on the possibilities that underlying mechanisms of processes from biochemistry, genetics and evolution might provide for art by implementing these as purely visual and image-generating systems. Self-organizing processes such as growth and evolution are theoretically still capable of being understood, but not visible in everyday life. Translated by artists, this science becomes perceptible at the level of the senses.
On the other side, there are artists who themselves go in search of ways to create living nature. Sometimes they make use of scientific methodologies and mechanisms, in order to see to what extent unnatural processes can become part of our environment. Computer processes and networks are examined for the creation of new and interesting visible phenomena. Artists are particularly interested in processes in which simple rules lead to complex behaviors. Efforts are undertaken to make digital life as real as possible, so that people can identify with it. Individuals from complex ecosystems eat each other up, reproduce or die a lonesome death. These examples reveal that these artificial processes perhaps have more relation with ‘wild nature’ than with what we see at this moment in our natural environment.
Finally, artists devote attention to invisible technology – technology that merges into our environment, architecture or body so that it becomes invisible and functions as a natural part of the environment. This puts to the test our conditioned way of seeing, and the artists focus on the possibility that nature takes on new meanings. According to them, recognisability ultimately underwrites true-to-nature images. Here a new image of Nature arises