Ever since delving into Eco's essay on the Hyperreality, and reading Geraint's old essay, I've become hyper aware of every encounter with nature in everyday life. I have lived in cities for as long as I can remember, which is a bit sad and ironic, being born in such a 'nature-rich' place like New Zealand... I think I was sort of living in the countryside, but I don't remember now, I only have childhood photos to prove that... but yes... I was living beside a sheep farm, we had a golden retriever, those were simpler times... at least for child me...our landscape affects so much on how we grow as individuals. As an adult now, we feel excited seeing wild animals in the city, we take pictures and videos of them, and we go home and digest it over and over again, like a secret meal. The early morning I departed for the Powell-Cotton museum, I was doing just that... it was the first time I've seen a fox, so so so clearly in the daylight, and it was beautiful, I've always had a weird attached feeling towards foxes, they're seen as pests, but they are so majestic to me ... perhaps it's cause I love the film Fantastic Mr. Fox so much... but then again, that is constructed nature, the fiction I digest so easily...
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| Mr Fox and his wife. |
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| Mr Fox showing his 'animal' side |
..seeing the fox on the street reminded me of that ghibli film.. The Cat Returns...the cats were walking in a weird ceremonial manner, with strange temple music, something foreign, where our protagonist hides to watch this scene unfold only to discover that this occasion was all set up to greet her, the savior who saved their cat prince that morning... something about animals standing up like humans when they're not supposed to is somewhat eerie... the film progresses and she slowly turns into a cat herself... but by the end, she turns back human...
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| the strange march at night in her street.. |
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| the 'security' cats throwing the wild cats off the path... strange contrast |
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| we see both 'normal' versions of cats in contrast to the 'human-like' cats from the kingdom. |
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baron's house is just like a dollhouse, and haru just manages to squeeze in. t
he gigantic and miniature? (susan stewart) the diorama? |
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| just before freaking out realising she had turned into a cat |
In the upcoming live-action of Cats, with the uncanny (horrible, frankly) CGI cat-like human faces and the whole fur-body situation, there is that weird dynamic of how real do we want it to look... CGI is great but, the original Cats musical (my personal favourite musical, I grew up watching it on dvd) with their costumes had a great theatrical aspect to it... it was striking in the way suitable for the songs and set.
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| the musical looks and feels much better... |
So I guess taking inspiration from nature is a great thing, otherwise we wouldn't have this many masterpieces in our culture... but is that Right??? to take something from nature and make it our own??? does it matter??? is this just a very Human thing to do??? I feel I am full of question marks. To be honest, what would our culture consist of if it weren't for nature/our landscape? our whole planet would be nothing... we wouldn't evolve, we wouldn't have recognised the potential in our surroundings inform us and teach us in ways that just human sources cannot...at the end, we are using nature as a tool to teach ourselves lessons about ourselves, humans. I don't know if I'm making sense... I think I'm just thinking that nature is such a sublime and magnificent force and, we owe literally everything to It, and I'm realising just how much of our culture is constructed from nature... but specifically, what I am looking into now, how much of NATURE is constructed from our CULTURE... so the artificial nature (?) it's just crazy how I've never really opened my eyes to all this 'fake' nature or 'manipulated' nature... is that real nature...? the boundaries for this seems to blur more and more... our human meddling with nature is making it harder and harder to access Real nature... I guess you can argue that packaged tours are designed to make it easier for us to access nature, in ways that we would never have been able to, so maybe it's a good thing? I don't know. I am confused because there seems to be no right or wrong.
anyway, I've always been taking photos in the city/suburbs... a lot of them with nature... and now I'm just seeing these photos in a new way... nature also gives us the sunlight to see all these things.. that fills us with colour... with freshness...
