Internet of Nature
Google Street View Nature tableaux, Digital prints
2021
Google Street View Nature tableaux, Digital prints
2021
Internet of Nature consists of photographic artworks which chronicle each of Dundee’s civic parks but from unexpected vantage points. These landscape images are captured from low perspectives as seen from the sightline of plants or small animals crouching against the landscape. As collaborating artists, Borda and JKD - also known as B+D, shifted the human-animal sightline with startling results. In walking across long swathes of park systems, B+D came to know Dundee in a way few of its residents may have experienced directly.
B+D's ‘Internet of Nature’ plays with concepts of what is not typically seen online and therefore not explored. These artworks are aligned both with a practice of past documentary photography, concerned with the careful choice and framing of its subject and composition and conceptual frameworks of salvage. The entire City of Dundee has become the artwork for the artists. The art exists as two corresponding bodies of work.
Viewers online can visit these artworks placed within Google Street View’s engine. This is a first in terms of (1) placing art and using the perspective of Nature, and (2) creating an entire virtual park system from the real purposely embedded into Google Street View’s engine.
B+D's urban parks and greenways – areas required the artists to walk into Nature verges and locations ‘off grid’ from road systems that are captured by Google Street View mounted cameras that scan across towns. Viewers local to Dundee, Scotland are provided with opportunities to seek out these views caught at a particular moment and time of season. This shift in seasonal time, space and perspective invites viewers to observe, and study Nature in greater detail in the same way someone may explore and admire Durer’s “The Great Piece of Turf” (1503).
As contemporary artworks, the Internet of Nature accomplishes something distinctive than the likes of artist, Mishka Henner, known for downloading scenes from Google Street View. B+D's landscapes are specifically composed and uploaded into the Google Street View Engine for serendipitous discovery. In this reversed format, the artworks become similar to Felix Gonzalez Torres’ open multiples –generously available for audiences to navigate, experience, contemplate, and take-away a component. B+D's online artworks are designed to be observed in intimate detail in the same way someone might take a candy from a Torres installation and their take-away involves in viewers locating and framing their own tangible view of the art in each panorama.
For exhibition the photo artworks are accompanied by QR codes so viewers can enter the images. Unlike conventional photographs and Susan Sontag’s concern that only a framed composition is available to the viewer – the Google enabled photographs allow viewers to see everything across the image plane.
Internet of Nature artworks are created both as conceptual portraits of Nature and an archive of Dundee’s civic park systems. Critically in a time of climate change, these Nature portraits serve as aide memoires of a changing space – an index of what is present. Will future temperature variations and extreme weather events change Dundee’s urban ecologies in the future? Much like the limitation of photographic images themselves capturing a temporal moment, Internet of Nature opens up questions about how we see and what is present."
B+D, November 2021
B+D's ‘Internet of Nature’ plays with concepts of what is not typically seen online and therefore not explored. These artworks are aligned both with a practice of past documentary photography, concerned with the careful choice and framing of its subject and composition and conceptual frameworks of salvage. The entire City of Dundee has become the artwork for the artists. The art exists as two corresponding bodies of work.
Viewers online can visit these artworks placed within Google Street View’s engine. This is a first in terms of (1) placing art and using the perspective of Nature, and (2) creating an entire virtual park system from the real purposely embedded into Google Street View’s engine.
B+D's urban parks and greenways – areas required the artists to walk into Nature verges and locations ‘off grid’ from road systems that are captured by Google Street View mounted cameras that scan across towns. Viewers local to Dundee, Scotland are provided with opportunities to seek out these views caught at a particular moment and time of season. This shift in seasonal time, space and perspective invites viewers to observe, and study Nature in greater detail in the same way someone may explore and admire Durer’s “The Great Piece of Turf” (1503).
As contemporary artworks, the Internet of Nature accomplishes something distinctive than the likes of artist, Mishka Henner, known for downloading scenes from Google Street View. B+D's landscapes are specifically composed and uploaded into the Google Street View Engine for serendipitous discovery. In this reversed format, the artworks become similar to Felix Gonzalez Torres’ open multiples –generously available for audiences to navigate, experience, contemplate, and take-away a component. B+D's online artworks are designed to be observed in intimate detail in the same way someone might take a candy from a Torres installation and their take-away involves in viewers locating and framing their own tangible view of the art in each panorama.
For exhibition the photo artworks are accompanied by QR codes so viewers can enter the images. Unlike conventional photographs and Susan Sontag’s concern that only a framed composition is available to the viewer – the Google enabled photographs allow viewers to see everything across the image plane.
Internet of Nature artworks are created both as conceptual portraits of Nature and an archive of Dundee’s civic park systems. Critically in a time of climate change, these Nature portraits serve as aide memoires of a changing space – an index of what is present. Will future temperature variations and extreme weather events change Dundee’s urban ecologies in the future? Much like the limitation of photographic images themselves capturing a temporal moment, Internet of Nature opens up questions about how we see and what is present."
B+D, November 2021
Exhibitions
2022-2023
Earth Photo: People, Place, Nature, Changing Forests in a Time of Climate Change
Curators: Royal Geographical Society, Forestry England, Harris Parker
Royal Geographic Society Headquarters and Exhibition Hall, London, UK June 17 - August 26, 2022
The Great Exhibition Road Festival, Royal Geographic Society Pavilion, London, June 18-19, 2022
Fineshade Wood, Top Lodge, Fineshade, Northamptonshire, November 1 – March 27, 2023
2021-23
Dundee COP26 Creative Climate Commission arts exhibition programme, Dundee, Scotland
Curator: John Gray, Dundee Public Art
Internet of Nature, Slessor Gardens Exhibition, Dundee City Council, Dundee City Centre, Scotland October 2021 – December 2023
Review
Photomonitor Winter edition 2021
https://photomonitor.co.uk/essay/internet-of-nature-touring-the-parks-of-dundee-scotland/
2022-2023
Earth Photo: People, Place, Nature, Changing Forests in a Time of Climate Change
Curators: Royal Geographical Society, Forestry England, Harris Parker
Royal Geographic Society Headquarters and Exhibition Hall, London, UK June 17 - August 26, 2022
The Great Exhibition Road Festival, Royal Geographic Society Pavilion, London, June 18-19, 2022
Fineshade Wood, Top Lodge, Fineshade, Northamptonshire, November 1 – March 27, 2023
2021-23
Dundee COP26 Creative Climate Commission arts exhibition programme, Dundee, Scotland
Curator: John Gray, Dundee Public Art
Internet of Nature, Slessor Gardens Exhibition, Dundee City Council, Dundee City Centre, Scotland October 2021 – December 2023
Review
Photomonitor Winter edition 2021
https://photomonitor.co.uk/essay/internet-of-nature-touring-the-parks-of-dundee-scotland/