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Project #1


 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 to my shoe to capture as much of the earth’s sound as possible and a Canon Rebel T6i camera to film walking outdoors. As the video progresses, it progressively worsens, mirroring Steyerl’s idea that images lose presence as they are copied, compressed, or mediated. The outdoors, something truly grounded, physical, and sensory, becomes increasingly distant and abstract through degradation. This visual decay emphasizes how screens fail to fully capture reality, even when used to document it. The worsening quality shows how digital culture has trained us all to accept less detail and less attention, forcing us to not live a life in the moment.

Her words, “The poor image is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail” suggest that poor images lack true presence. Even the best quality media cannot accurately depict true reality. I resisted this expectation of the media by intentionally degrading the video I filmed, aligning with Steyerl’s argument that a poor image is not just a technical failure. As the video worsens, viewers have to rely on memory, imagination, and feeling rather than visual clarity, showing what disappears when an experience is shown through a screen. The screen can only hold fragments, while the real moment and experience continue elsewhere, untouched by resolution or loss.


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