Today’s suburban kids are not exposed to the natural world. “Environment” for people such as these imply McDonalds, Walmart, and parking garages. For my project, I took on an effort to bring nature back into our “environment”. An outdoor classroom served as the environment to view nature scenes, taken from BBC’s Planet Earth.
My project evolved from trying to bring natural images to places where nature no longer is present. The outdoor classroom served as a good location due to its unnatural benches and cement ground. Here we can “reclaim” the space with natural imagery to bring nature back to the outdoors. I tried to project the scene through the benches to show some idea of a “caged nature”, but the benches did not lend themselves to working with the concept. Thus, projector remains unobstructed.
I think my project had limited success in looking at site specificity using imagery. The contrast of natural images against the Center for Mathematics and Computing speaks somewhat to the decline of “nature” in our “environment”. As people stopped by to investigate, comments of "I didn't know birds could do that" and "So that's how that works..." could be heard.
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