me·di·a·tion | ˌmē-dē-ˈā-shən1
Mediation
When I’m filming in a National Park and watching humans engage with the landscape, animals, and plants that surround them - I can’t help but wonder whether we have any ability to directly access the natural world.
Cars drive through the carefully designed roads and visitors look out through their windows, stopping at picturesque overlooks to take photographs. Birders squint against their binoculars, searching for the next “lifer”2. Paleontologists look through microscopes to carefully carve out fossilized bone from rock. Wildlife biologists maintain trail cameras that capture all that moves through its frame. And I use my camera to film them all. Collectively, we use these technical tools of perception to quantify, to study, to admire, to capture, to create meaning, to predict, to understand.
But what is all this mediation, all this capturing? Where does this compulsion come from, and what does it mean now?
Perhaps it’s a perfect metaphor for the trap that we find ourselves in, between separating ourselves from nature while also being part of it. Or maybe it’s a metaphor for how it takes some sort of mediation to really look at that which is right in front of us. Or maybe it’s a form of domination, something that allows us to treat the world outside of us as a resource to be extracted. Or maybe it’s to do with what we understand knowledge to be - if I haven’t “done” something with it, can I know it?
Or maybe it’s related to preservation and loss, as Schultz-Figueroa writes: "John Berger famously argued that as animals began to disappear from daily life throughout the 19th century, representations of them multiplied to make up for their absence."3
In a world that is increasingly defined by human impact, do these technologies represent a heartbreaking irony of us trying to get closer and closer to that which is moving farther and farther away?
- intervention between conflicting parties to promote reconciliation, settlement, or compromise
- indirect conveyance or communication through an intermediary
- transmission by an intermediate mechanism or agency
Mediation
When I’m filming in a National Park and watching humans engage with the landscape, animals, and plants that surround them - I can’t help but wonder whether we have any ability to directly access the natural world.
Cars drive through the carefully designed roads and visitors look out through their windows, stopping at picturesque overlooks to take photographs. Birders squint against their binoculars, searching for the next “lifer”2. Paleontologists look through microscopes to carefully carve out fossilized bone from rock. Wildlife biologists maintain trail cameras that capture all that moves through its frame. And I use my camera to film them all. Collectively, we use these technical tools of perception to quantify, to study, to admire, to capture, to create meaning, to predict, to understand.
But what is all this mediation, all this capturing? Where does this compulsion come from, and what does it mean now?
Perhaps it’s a perfect metaphor for the trap that we find ourselves in, between separating ourselves from nature while also being part of it. Or maybe it’s a metaphor for how it takes some sort of mediation to really look at that which is right in front of us. Or maybe it’s a form of domination, something that allows us to treat the world outside of us as a resource to be extracted. Or maybe it’s to do with what we understand knowledge to be - if I haven’t “done” something with it, can I know it?
Or maybe it’s related to preservation and loss, as Schultz-Figueroa writes: "John Berger famously argued that as animals began to disappear from daily life throughout the 19th century, representations of them multiplied to make up for their absence."3
In a world that is increasingly defined by human impact, do these technologies represent a heartbreaking irony of us trying to get closer and closer to that which is moving farther and farther away?
1. "mediation" Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2021. Web. 7 December 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mediation ︎︎︎
3. Schultz-Figueroa, Benjamin. “From Cat to Clowder.” In Kedi, by Kristen Fuhs, 4–18. edited by Jaimie Baron, 1st ed. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429355257-1-2. ︎︎︎