Nothing is Connected to Everything;
Everything is Connected to Something;
The Representation of Non-Human Organisms
and Their Ecosystems Through Digital Art.

Author: Isabella Pirro
Institution: Istituto Marangoni
Course: MA Digital Design for Immersive Experiences

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1 National Geographic Society. “Anthro-pocene.” National Geographic. Accessed December 18, 2023. https://education. nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthro-pocene/.

2 Lin, Po-Hsien. “A Dream of Digital Art: Beyond the Myth of Contemporary Com-puter Technology in Visual Arts.” Visual Arts Research 31, no. 1 (2005): 4–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715364.
3 Carlisle, Anne. “Art & Technology: Inter-active Art.” Circa, no. 73 (1995): 18–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/25562848.

4 Wong, Chee-Onn, Keechul Jung, and Joonsung Yoon. “Interactive Art: The Art That Communicates.” Leonardo 42, no. 2 (2009): 180–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20532638.

Abstract

Human existence is an intriguing concept. What is life as we know it, we define it as the recollection of experiences through the ecosystems we inhabit through the use of our senses and our perception, those which in turn affect our actions and thoughts and define our reality and what we make of it. Since the 1950s with the start of the geological period we still inhabit today known as the Anthropocene,(1) we have observed a rise in human-made systems with effects that stretch far beyond our scope but remain meaningful only to our reach—a period where our effect on non-human organisms and their ecosystems was highly overlooked. With the rise of new technologies and innovative thinking, we have been able to claim a better understanding of our impact on the earthly world, more so by understanding our effect on non-human organisms and their ecosystems.

This happens through a realization that not a single organism remains intact, disconnected from others, as we are made up of intricate threads. As Donna Haraway states “Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something”. Therefore with this research, I propose a unity between the clear disconnect and polarisation of the human and non-human, through the exploration of art and its use of new technologies in aiding our understanding of non-human ecosystems.

In this study, we first focus on how art came to be digital art. We delve into the main elements of the artistic display, which are the artist, the curator, and the experience itself, and we thoroughly explore the impact of technology on each of these different elements. The first subchapter explores where the artist meets media and how throughout time with the introduction of cameras and printing techniques we started to delve into what would further develop into the computer digital arts.(2) The second subchapter focuses on the changing role of the curator and how a role that already remains hard to define because of the spectrum of tasks they embark on in the artistic display was doubled to not only a physical space but a virtual space to discover, archive, and share information. Then, as we begin to form an understanding of how technology exponentially changed the art world, we begin to see its potential as a medium of communication that challenges how we perceive and experience art in itself. This brings us to our last subchapter which is the new scenarios in experiencing art through technology. Here we explore some of the endless amounts of tools and possibilities for expressing and sharing information with audiences. We focus on interactivity and environments(3) in which the lines between the physical and virtual realms start to blur.

Further on, as we begin to understand the role of digital art and its impact, we start to delve into the second topic of relevance in this study, which is non-human organisms and ecosystems. This term refers to the five different kingdoms of living species with the exclusion of the human species. We explore their differences from humans and move further to the second subchapter to understand why these organisms and their ecosystems are of relevance to human affairs and our well-being, such as with the study of biophilic design which has proven to aid in the restoration of humans cognitive, physiological, and psychological systems. This leads us to the last subchapter where non-human organism communication modes are explored and how the use of technology has allowed us to better understand these complex processes.

As we begin to formalize an understanding of non-human organisms and how this can aid us in improving the collective well-being of earthly beings, we begin to see how without an effective medium of communication this information might otherwise remain only relevant or available to more limited amounts of people, which is where digital art comes into play. In this chapter, we further explore how digital art is currently being utilized to represent non-human organisms and their ecosystems to display and share information through experiences to broader audiences. The way that information is received is highly crucial to determine the effect of the display and to understand the positive impacts that these experiences can have on a collective. The importance of interactivity as a form of communication is explored in the last chapter of this study as a way to understand how is it that the spectator “talks” with the installation.(4) Whilst still taking into consideration, as explored in Gregory Sholette’s Dark Matter Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, that there is always something unsaid that usually is not measured between an audience and an artwork, but remains as an invisible matter that creates a ripple effect of change through time, which in turn showcases that by utilizing digital art as a form of representation for non-human organisms and their ecosystems, we can promote a collective understanding and knowledge in the bigger spectrum to incentivize a change for the bettering of the earthly world.