From Nature to Nature by Nature: The History of Representing Nature and Dark Ecology

Based on certain starting points offered in the writings of Timothy Morton, one of the key theoretical authorities on contemporary arts that deal with ecology, the paper focuses on the broad field of the aesthetics of nature throughout the history of its artistic representation, especially in the visual media. In the paper, I try to show that the aesthetics of nature as it is produced via various artistic (visual, audiovisual, literary) media cannot be reduced to the narrowly understood images of nature because art is immanently environmentally poetic: it always also produces models of the relationship of any organisms to the environment and models of space, which is precisely the field of ecology.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!