The next step was to present these works in a context that also allowed conservationists from the VNPA and environmental scientists to voice their concerns based on the scientific findings that this material helped to uncover. We provided artists with the same photographs and video footage that would usually be used by scientists, and each artist re-worked and interpreted the original footage in their own way. (Brüggemeier and Miranda 2012)įrom there the formula for the project arose. It's as if wildlife social-realism meets the monochromatic aesthetic of night vision surveillance and we are becoming voyeurs of another intelligence at work - which we would not have encountered otherwise. Looking at the photos there is something incredibly intimate and unguarded about them. In the curatorial statement for the first iteration of Nature in the Dark artists videos, Maria Miranda and I described our experience viewing the source material like this: NITD 1: source material from Unlikely Journal on Vimeo.
The combination of the 'natural' behaviour of the animals and the aesthetic of night-vision photography provided absolutely fascinating material for an art project. To the curators, the raw and random nature of these photographs lacking direct human intention, felt aesthetically liberating. The absence of a person behind the lens of the camera (in combination with some attractive bait) also allowed for more revealing behaviour on the part of the animals, allowing them to come as close as possible to the camera or even to run it over completely. These night-vision shots showed no sign of any intention and preference in regard to the object of choice or the framing of the photographs, which clearly distinguished them from the staged work of a human photographer. The results were predominantly black-and-white photographs. The cameras were motion-triggered and most active at night set off by nocturnal animals. Matt introduced me to VNPA's citizens-science project Caught on Camera (Nature Watch) that used cameras to study the long-term impact of wild fires on fauna in Victorian national parks. Nature in the Dark evolved from an over-the-garden-fence conversation between neighbours in Preston, Victoria, with Matt Ruchel, the CEO of Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA), on one side and me on the other.
Nature in the Dark – Communities of Sense and Ecological Imagination Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier
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