Green Screen

Catarina Braga

Post-Post-Nature: The Green Screen as the Sixth Biome  was presented at the international conference Arts and Humanities in Digital Transition at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa (ICNOVA, 06-07.07.2023)



Abstract 

“Post-post-nature is a new term proposed in the master’s thesis “Post-Post-Nature — The Technological Mediation between Humans, Plants, and Plant Images” (2022, FBAUP) so as to characterize a new kind of nature: the digital nature of plant images. In a double sense of the word “-post” — the first coming from post-naturalism, a scientific theory that explains how plants and other organisms have changed to a post-natural state through their cultivation, and the second from the post-photographic condition of digital and online photographs proposed by Joan Fontcuberta — plant images survive in between screens producing their own digital roots in our technological devices.

After the five major biomes of the planet, the green screen is proposed as the new biome for the digital ecosystem of mediated plants and nature. The idea of presenting the green screen as a sixth biome was first introduced in the last chapter of the mentioned thesis (2022), but was not developed in-depth. From a theoretical-practical approach to the research, the artistic practice presented will evidence how these matters are materialised in the artworks, with video and installations.

This digital ecosystem is also understood as a container that stages and performs (Boris Groys) plant images stories, as a place for thinking about the mutability of such plant images as “media-bodies”, considering that the bodies that are formed in these crossings “(de)monstrate” and open reflection to the practices of imaginaries. “Media-bodies” show their own specific experiences, politics and languages: they are their own medium appearance.”

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Braga, Catarina. (2022). Pós-Pós-Natureza - A Mediação Tecnológica entre Seres Humanos, Plantas e Imagens de Plantas.

Groys, Boris. (2016).  "Chapter 9: Modernity and Contemporaneity: Mechanical vs Digital Reproduction", in In The Flow. London, NY: Verso, pp. 137-146.