Innovators 3

15 August - 14 September 2008

Kit WISE
Natural Disaster
2008
mirrored acrylic, MDF, timber, digital projection

All the video footage presented in this work is open source archive material freely available on the internet. The sequences were filmed by onlookers of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami disaster in Koh Lanta, Phuket and Penang, Thailand, and in Sri Lanka.

The work aims to explore our complicated relationship with the natural world and the way both nature and disaster are represented in contemporary culture. In an age of increasingly impending environmental disaster and attendant media attention, nature is both paradise and nightmare, source of desire and fear, ideal and horror. These conditions of nature - as well as disaster - are constructed as 'spectacle' through the visual media of our current time; such that they are more often comprehended as events that are constructed through advertising, the media, film and television, than as realities. The consequences of operating only at this level of synthesised nature and disaster, which avoids engagement with their actuality, could have a potentially severe impact on both our understanding of the environment and our responses to humanitarian crises.

With thanks to the Contemporary Art + Critical Publics Research Cluster,
Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University

 

 

 


image: Kit Wise