Wilderness Trouble V1.0 (2007) by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir
Wilderness Trouble V1.0 was inspired by William Cronon’s article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In this article, which was critical to ecocriticism’s recent shift from deep to social ecological models, Cronon argues that the concept of “wilderness” has no basis in nature but is a historical and cultural product. Cronon’s points out that the U.S. environmentalist preoccupation with conserving “natural” spaces untouched by humans was a guise of American colonialism (throwing indigenous people off their land to make national parks), and his concern is it fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments. Refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments, this meditational DV attempts think about nature and the digital technologies that make this work possible in the same frame. This video contributes to recent artistic efforts to challenge the separation of digital technology from the natural world and attempts to do so without naturalizing the digital nor romanticizing the “natural.”
– Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir
