"Wilderness Trouble V1.0 "
Cary Peppermint & Christine Nadir
Podcast and DVD - 2007

This quicktime video and DVD is a response to William Cronon’s article, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” This text was integral to ecocriticism’s recent shift from deep to social ecological theoretical frameworks and argues that “wilderness” is not a natural space but a cultural and historical construct. Looking at United States environmentalism in particular, Cronon asserts that the preoccupation with conserving "natural" spaces untouched by humans not only originates as a guise of American colonialism (e.g. throwing indigenous people off land to create national parks); it also fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and the environments they actually inhabit. In this meditational DV, EcoArtTech adds a consideration of the technological to this reevaluation of wilderness. By refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments and by thinking about nature and the digital technologies that make this video possible in the same frame, "Wilderness Trouble" contributes to recent artistic efforts to challenge the separation of digital technology from the natural world and attempts to do so without naturalizing the digital nor romanticizing the "natural."


Click here to view Wilderness Trouble V1.0 >>