Into the Wild


Nature and technology are often forced into an antagonistic relationship and artists Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir, known jointly as EcoArtTech, seek to problematize this faulty opposition. "The question of whether human use of technology is ecologically a fault or a strength, the relation of the digital to the natural, the expansion of the imagination of what constitutes technology" are a few of the lines of inquiry which form the core of their work. A Series of Practical Perfomances in the Summer of 2005 was a series of performances in which the artists negotiate their relationship to nature and the idea of 'wilderness.' Slightly ritualistic and also humorous, one performance enacts an important element of our modern quest for nature--driving there. For their newest project, Untitled Landscapes for Portable Media Players Peppermint and Nadir, as the title would suggest, offer a series of four moving landscapes to be played on your iPod (or whatever portable device you might use). In the tradition of the landscape painting these moving images offer the viewer a chance to contemplate the sublime character of nature, but in the case of EcoArtTech's landscapes, the sublime is sublimated under layers of technological intervention.