"Will non-humans benefit, like humans, from the promise of salvation? In other words, will non-humans be resurrected too?"
- Bruno Latour
In my ongoing work as a (still amateur) digital artist this fall, I have become above all interested in the embedded hybridity of new media. Or that's really to say, I'm really engaged by how new digital technologies don't actually re-imagine a new future as some are tempted to believe, but rather re-discover the past. They allow, in so many words, a review on how we see and have seen things, including how those specific subjects that are most often and now digitally re-represented might be viewed again.
Of course, one of the most popular of these subjects remains 'nature' itself. Broadly speaking, this is because of how readily landscape, animal, and so-called 'exotic' images can now be moved and stored from across the globe as we sit, supposedly, in relative urban safety watching them via internet connection.
But a nature-human divide - which now seems so deeply, ideologically entrenched - is a false divide. It has never existed and it especially does not exist in the server farms whose miles of coils buzz and whine at this very moment and change the pattern of the flight of the birds overhead. The only question will be, in this embededness, just how much further we will drive the 'rest of life' into the ground? So in this piece, I wonder how the birds might look through the viewfinder? How would they make sense of just how hard it was to be raised up out of the ground, their wings having been pinned by all the dead cows, chickens, and apes beneath them and left behind, thank god, during the resurrection?
