Theme:

Recreation

Image: Ilkka Halso

Do we still have genuine experiences of nature? Or are we living in a postcard of it?

Some centuries ago landscape painters taught us to appreciate the quality of an untouched landscape. Ever since we have been doing everything to recreate it.

We camouflage cell phone antenna mast to look like tries. We fly thousands of miles to experience a pristine landscape. Some countries even go so far to reconstruct prehistoric landscapes at obsolete industrial sites – revived extinct animals included.

Video: A Day in the Dutch Landscape
Highlanders in the Lowlands: Re-enactment of an extinct Cow
Under the Beach lies the Pavement
Come see the Berg!
Dog Modding in China
Nature is an Agreement
Dubai Globe: Sea versus Economy
Tulip Island - Design a Polder
Artificial island Dubai
The Virtual Lives of Extinct Animals

Fake for Real: Phone Trees

For a long time in the history of painting, the landscape functioned merely as a backdrop for people, buildings or symbols. But in the 17th century, artists started making paintings using the landscape as the …

A more realistic Zoo

Going to the zoo is a favorite summer past-time. Visitors to the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna will see lots of animals in recreated ‘natural’ habitats. Except this summer, along with the animals, there’s an odd …

Summit of the Mount Everest on Tour

Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth, as measured by the height of its summit above sea level. In May 2005, artist Xu Zhen led an ascent on Everest, and succeeded in removing …

Video: A Day in the Dutch Landscape

Highlanders in the Lowlands: Re-enactment of an extinct Cow

At the end of every cold winter there is a debate in the Netherlands on whether the forestry service should feed the oxes, horses and deers grazing the Dutch nature resorts. The official policy of the Dutch forestry service is to let the ecosystem manage itself, which causes the weaker animals – 24% of the population – to parish because of lack of food: a sight too natural for most ‘nature’ lovers.

In response to the protests, the initiators of the Dutch ‘hands-off’ landscape management argue that the protests of hikers, bikers and other tourists merely exemplify how alienated people have become from nature. However, are the premises of these policy makers really valid? Is it defendable to leave the animals in the hands of the elements or is this game getting out of hand?

The regenerated prehistoric landscapes are best understood as theater. Like in a theater play or a movie, we are willing to suspend our disbelief and linger in the imaginary story portrayed before us.

— Koert van Mensvoort, Highlanders in the Lowlands

The Virtual Lives of Extinct Animals

What happens when next nature dreams of old nature? Such is the case with extinct animals that have ever come in contact with humans, particularly the dinosaurs, our own postmodern dragons. Creatures that we layer with a fearful wonderment, dinosaurs are a fantastic lost fauna that emerge through hints and half-glimpses, much like the accounts of dragons passed through fragmented texts or embellished traveler’s tales. As with dragons, our only knowledge of their behavior emerges from our imaginations.

In the Victorian era, dinosaurs were brutal, ugly creatures, as slow-witted as they were slow-footed. They reflected notions of a grand evolutionary hierarchy that gradually, almost purposefully, gave rise to homo sapiens. The contemporary dinosaur would be unrecognizable to the Victorian paleontologist. Smaller theropods are now covered …

Dog Modding in China

As a child, I already saw some great tiger potential in my cat and some shark-ish attitude in the behaviour of my goldfish. Personally, I think that since we started domesticating animals, man must have had fantasies about undomesticating them. The thrill of making ‘man’s best friend’ into his enemy again – if only it where for one day: Back to the tribe!

The newest thing amongst dog owners in China seems to have emerged from this understandable fantasy and …

Observing Old Nature

Nature is an Agreement

Nature is an agreement. Just like the nude beach. Here you keep your breasts and your crotch covered, There you drop everything and act like it is the most ordinary thing in the world that everyone is suddenly walking around naked. That is also how we deal with nature nowadays. We make an agreement with each other that this or that piece of the country is ‘nature’, and put a sign next to it and a fence around it.

By TRACY METZ

Nature itself must of course stick to this agreement – no thorns, please, no bites and certainly no flooding! – and it must stick to the budget. After all, we have invested a lot of time and money in making nature.

Nature is also a feeling. A symbol for an escape from the rush of everyday life, a time and a place for reflection. We project onto nature our yearning for that which is larger than ourselves, larger than life, something which is not subject to the latest hype, fad and fashion. Nature represents eternal value.

There is something in us which longs for nature precisely because it is beyond our control. At the same time, paradoxically, we cannot bear the fact that it is beyond our control. So while we find the naturalness of nature attractive, at the same time we feel the urge to get a grip on it, to control it. Wildness must be tempered.

Nature is also an image. You might even say: without images… no nature. Without Discovery Channel no wild animals in the Serengeti, without amateur video no tsunami, without scented candles no autumn smells, without a …

Come see the Berg!

So you’ve seen the peak of the Mount Everest on tour? Descended the bobsled ride of the Matterhorn in a Disneyland? Think you’ve seen it all? Now come and see The Berg in Berlin!

German architect Jakob Tigges explores the outskirts of megalomania with his proposed a plan to construct a 1000-meter tall mountain at the site of the recently closed Tempelhof airport in Berlin, which was originally constructed by the Nazi’s as part of their megalomaniac Germania plan.

Under the Beach lies the Pavement

During the riots of 1968, as students in Paris ripped up paving stones and threw them at the police, one of the rallying cries was “sous le pave: la plage” (under the pavement: the beach). The beach – the incarnation of a natural, undesignated and non-utilitarian space – was the opposite of the street, a historic relic of a designated, oppressive environment based on private property.

Since May 1968, policymakers have learned to better comply with the needs of the public. At various cities in the worlds every summer a temporarily artificial beach is created on the pavement. Last year alone, in Mexico City the local governmentcreated 10 artificial beaches, mostly in poorer parts of the city.