Helen's Blog

  Project #1  Nature Through a Screen ART-2060-A-Media Arts(Digital Sketchbook) Helen Obrecht January 24, 2025 https://youtu.be/KUL- link to video! When I started this project, I was thinking about how different it feels to be outside in the moment compared to watching through a screen. Nature is often experienced today through phones and screens rather than through real presence. Most people, for example, have seen the Amazon rainforest or at least know about it, but few have actually experienced it. The same idea applies to many animals. You may have seen a lion in a zoo or a documentary about a lion hunt, but very few people have truly experienced a lion in its natural habitat. Screens mediate reality. What we see and consume digitally is not the same as the lived experience. I believe that too many people take what we have around us for granted. In this project, I played with the representation of the outdoors through a screen. I used a Rode Wireless Go II speaker attached...

Sneak peek into my process! Using a  Canon Rebel T6i camera to film & Rode Wireless Go II mics to record sound! Originally uploaded the SD card content onto the computers in the lab because they have the built in card readers, then sent the video to my computer to edit.  

 Photo taken on my phone during a video filmed on camera! Is this photo a true depiction of the real life experience of being at that location? Food for thought...

  Hito Steyerl discusses poor images in a few ways that motivated my project idea. She discusses a loss of presence and the distance from reality from images. Her words, “The poor image is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an itinerant image distributed for free,” stuck with me. Images and photography have drastically improved, and with the uprising of artificial intelligence, sometimes you have to question whether an image is actually real or not. Calling the image a “ghost” emphasizes that it lacks physical, real presence. What can appear on a screen is not the thing or the experience itself; a photo can remind you of an experience or perhaps help you envision it, but there is no real inherent nature you can experience from a photo or video. Steyerl also shows that screens change how we experience things. “They lose matter and gain speed” is a quote that stuck with me. I found this phrase powerful through the wording “loosing matter,” which suggests the loss of physica...