Abstract

The paper will explore natural and 3D technological environments from a research creation approach. It will analyze the ways in which the 3D digital medium may extend the artist’s relationship with time, space, and materiality; the impacts of the digital environment on the artist’s creative process; and the outcomes that reflect on a visual aesthetic literacy traditionally informed by analogue means. The paper will inquire into the significance of the volatility, impalpability, and mutability of the digital medium, which sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes thus: “The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age. There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it.” (Baudrillard, Simulations 54). From an artist’s perspective, and reflecting human and media ecology discourses, the paper is intended to stimulate creative exploration of natural and technological environments, both of which are increasingly embedded in the societal values of the world in which we live.