The urgency of recovering contemplation. New Media Art and the transformation of nature into landscape

Abstract

Adam Basanta is the author of the installation named Landscape Past Future, exhibited at the gnration gallery in Braga, Portugal, between 23 October and 11 January 2020. This artistic project is based on images of works of art (landscape painting and photography) from the main institutional collections, publicly available, used to create new digital landscapes. Applying custom digital mosaic software, small data sets were placed and rearranged on a virtual screen to create a new aggregate image. Starting from this case, we intend to investigate how the landscape genre, remedied by the new media art, challenges us to reframe both nature and landscape ideas, in contemporary times. This article aims to discuss the role of new technologies as a medium that can help us to recover the exercise of contemplation, and to transform « nature » into « landscape », as an action of seeing and thinking, after all the first step to really act, with a sense of urgency, on our unsustainable habitat.