Mikhail Mansion
Is the transmission of nature free to emerge within an advancing technological world, or has its fundamental imagination been reduced to fantasies with no real consequence? If art is the imaginative act, then an information society with the greatest creative tools must act to build sustainable relationships to its environment and preserve the rich biodiversity that comprises its health. But the commercial media-sphere is using these tools to recreate the world through image, shaping interactions through modes of simulation—emulations that turn imaginative forms of engagement into passive modes of fantasy. The fantasy space has been called many things, including hyperreality by Jean Baudrillard (a theory that inspired the Matrix trilogy); within this space, society can only solve problems through its own limited imagination, typically dominated by an economic valuation. Such frames have debased many post-industrial Western cultures from obtaining ecological engagements capable of reaching their object—those of nature and each other. My work takes up this concern in hopes of reestablishing an imagination for natural ecology. Through the convergence of art, science and engineering, I take both the phenomena and consequences of the environment, including its human and non-human elements, and transmit their qualities into the everyday spaces that have otherwise drowned our imaginative abilities to relate the world in rich, meaningful ways. I do this through new media technologies in an aesthetic form I call transmission.



