As technology continues to advance, what role does AI and CGI play in our experience of “wilderness”? We can visit Arrakis or Pandora or a world completely of the imagination where purple anteater/dolphin crosses swim through the sky almost as easily as the people of the late 1800 could visit Yellowstone on a stethoscope.
Ooh, great comparison! Your answers will be as good as mine. But what strikes me about your comment is the word "imagination." A stereoscope was not "nature" because it lacked the other senses and the scale -- the immersive-ness. Newer technologies aspire to more immersion, but not necessarily from the wilderness itself (in the sense that WH Jackson had to go to Yellowstone to get those stereoscopic pictures). Instead from the imagination. This strikes me as dangerous.
Yet I'm surprised at my pessimism. Late-1800s preservationists clearly welcomed stereoscopes. Is it just the technology that's changed, or us?
The wilderness of the mind… I think right now we can distinguish between natural wilderness and imaginative wilderness but one day, it may not be so cut and dry. Certainly we are seeing that now where AI generated images are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
Maybe the involvement of all of the senses is key- that’s one of the main reasons I go into the wilderness. Which only brings up the idea of the preservation of the experience of all of our senses. Dark Skies for example. My last visit to Escalante I was painfully aware of the almost constant sound of airplanes overhead… but I digress
As technology continues to advance, what role does AI and CGI play in our experience of “wilderness”? We can visit Arrakis or Pandora or a world completely of the imagination where purple anteater/dolphin crosses swim through the sky almost as easily as the people of the late 1800 could visit Yellowstone on a stethoscope.
Ooh, great comparison! Your answers will be as good as mine. But what strikes me about your comment is the word "imagination." A stereoscope was not "nature" because it lacked the other senses and the scale -- the immersive-ness. Newer technologies aspire to more immersion, but not necessarily from the wilderness itself (in the sense that WH Jackson had to go to Yellowstone to get those stereoscopic pictures). Instead from the imagination. This strikes me as dangerous.
Yet I'm surprised at my pessimism. Late-1800s preservationists clearly welcomed stereoscopes. Is it just the technology that's changed, or us?
The wilderness of the mind… I think right now we can distinguish between natural wilderness and imaginative wilderness but one day, it may not be so cut and dry. Certainly we are seeing that now where AI generated images are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
Maybe the involvement of all of the senses is key- that’s one of the main reasons I go into the wilderness. Which only brings up the idea of the preservation of the experience of all of our senses. Dark Skies for example. My last visit to Escalante I was painfully aware of the almost constant sound of airplanes overhead… but I digress
What a great flashback. We had one and it was always exciting to get a new disk to insert into the viewer. Thanks for the history.