Not an AVATAR Review: Technology and Environmental Art
So I went to Avatar last weekend. I figured I’d enjoy the story fairly well, but really, I’d gone simply to see it—to decide for myself if the much-touted cinematic sea-change was all that. And it was. Even without the benefit of 3-D, the movie was visually astounding. Which is probably why the thing I keep thinking about is the strange role that technology plays in the film. On the one hand, Cameron et al. developed some tremendous new envisioning technologies so that this film could be fully realized. On the other hand, the movie’s narrative went a long way toward suggesting that tech is aligned with—how to say this gently?—the forces of evil.
What’s up with that?
I have plenty of guesses—some terribly generous toward the film and its makers, others far less so. Those don’t much matter, though. What does is that this film manages to have it both ways—to rely utterly on new tech and to critique technology as an agent of environmental harm. Already, Avatar has become a touchstone for a host of conversations, and it may help us think through an issue that matters greatly to emerging environmental artists: the “appropriate” roles of technology in their art.
Artists of all stripes balance competing concerns in their work, but environmental artists engage a set of challenges that are particularly vexing. They must make work that has artistic integrity even as they consider the environmental impact of their art-making decisions. Other artists might worry about their carbon footprints, the ecological impacts of their materials, the amount of gasoline used in creating and disseminating their work, and the like. Environmental artists must; those concerns are woven into the very fabric of their practice.
I’ve watched many art students grapple with these issues—sometimes to paralyzing ends. The near-impossibility of creating absolutely environmentally “clean” work leaves some undone. Even for those who are willing to compromise (as they see it), the question of appropriate technology often arises. What are okay technologies to employ? How can the tech complement or complicate the artwork, rather than dominating the audience’s awareness? Taking it to the simplest level, they want to figure out whether integrating a GPS or iPhone into a project that takes place in the woods inevitably risks privileging the tech over the locale. They fear that creating video or new media work that is seen on-line or in a gallery risks further distancing audience members from the natural environment—that they are contributing to the distressing notion that a virtual tour can replace an actual tromp.
To which one might say, “but can’t it? Sometimes?” Audiences, like artists, need to pose questions of how much non-renewable energy they should use, of how much tromping is too much in fragile eco-systems. A virtual visit can’t offer what an actual one can; but certain virtual visits offer something equally valuable. Going to a national park via EcoArtTech’s “Eclipse” project is not the same as hiking IRL, but the experience is meaningful and eye-opening. The value in the EcoArtTech approach is precisely that: they have crafted a new kind of experience for viewers, one that encourages a different—but powerful—environmental engagement with the Parks.
Moreover, not incorporating technologies into the work doesn’t mean that the technologies are not part of the work. Paradoxical, yes. But think about it: an art work, arising as it does within a particular culture, is of that culture, so both the presence and the absence of relevant cultural elements become part of the work. A large format, black-and-white photograph of a seemingly pristine mountain made today is what it is in no small part by virtue of being not made with a digital point and shoot, not made in color, not printed digitally, not of an overtly developed landscape. If we see the image as anachronistic, we do so because these seemingly absent traces of contemporary technology are actually present, imposed by our minds. They influence our response as much as does our recollection of similar images by earlier makers. And so we do see it as anachronistic, unless something in the work gives us confidence that the maker knows what s/he’s doing.
That might sound like I’m saying that the environmental artist’s engagement with technology is a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t issue. That’s not quite it. Rather, it’s that thinking one can ‘go green’ artistically by rejecting the contemporary technologies is simplistic. The significance of the technologies permeates the art-making process, the physical landscape, the mental landscape, the lives of maker and audience.
Ironically, that point, itself so central to environmental art, often becomes lost in nuts-and-bolts conversations about gasoline and carbon offsets and the relative merits of (for instance) digital versus analog photography.
Which brings me back to Avatar, and why I’m grateful for Cameron’s extremely ostentatious example of having it both ways. The film offers an exemplum that’s especially useful for folks like my students, people who are digitally dexterous and environmentally committed. It gives a concrete case against which we can test assumptions, hone the way we ask our questions, push until we get past knee-jerk notions. And that’s helpful.
In: Text · Tagged with: art, Avatar, EcoArtTech, environmentalism, technology
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on February 5, 2010 at 5:36 pm
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A voice from the past (and his avatar) wave and say “hello”!
on February 22, 2010 at 9:48 pm
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I had just said to myself, “perhaps Margot could give me a reading list that I’d have to follow,” to jump-start me back into this sort of conversation . . .