Ceci n'est pas une pipe

"The vision of sublime nature is tempered to a certain extent because it is a picture, the product of a technological process. The sublime experience has been captured by technology, reproducing a vicarious domesticated sublime" (DeLuca, 247). For the purpose of environmental communication, I think that this quote is important to look at in further detail. I titled this post "ceci n'est pas une pipe" after the Rene Magritte painting, because, like the pipe in the painting, the landscape we observe is not actually a landscape. It is mediately sublime, and what we need to know, for effective environmental communication is whether this is enough. Does a painting, a photograph, a song or film, convey the same awe and weight that observing a scene in real life evokes? Are we as moved to action through media as we are through experience?

My fear is that, in our hyper-voyeuristic culture, these stunning and often unfathomable images will be dismissed as "cool." I fear that they will be printed out by 19-year-olds with limited knowledge and passive interest, and collaged onto their walls with posters of bygone musicians and old vinyl sleeves. And perhaps this trend plants the seed of awareness, so that seven years later these teenagers remember the image they printed and choose to take up arms against it, but more likely is the over-exposure to the repeated image leading the teen to a desensitization of the phenomena the image depicts. DeLuca disagrees; he believes that the process of turning the physical sublime into a representation of it, it adds a second layer of meaning, and consequently, weight. DeLuca calls this the technological sublime, for its unique ability to create a view that no real experience could recreate. The "god's eye view" (248) in lieu of "bird's eye view" refers back to the sublime by tying it to religion and the intangible. It is this component, perhaps, that gives environmental art its place among environmental communication texts: the photograph, the painting, and the song, all have the capacity to present to the audience a perspective or feeling far greater than the one they may have experiencing it on their own. Through this sublime, albeit distanced, experience of the natural and the superimposed destruction, the artwork may in fact elicit stronger reactions from the audience than any other form of environmental communication.

DeLuca, K., & Demo, A. (2000).  Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism.  Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3), 241-260.