ABSTRACT
Nature is both the environment in which we live and a complex cultural construction. Hence nature both includes the human and is defined by it. It is both inside and outside the human subject. Because of this, there is an interdependence between the evolution of the human subject and the evolution of the concept and practice of nature. In recent years, through the development of genetics and artificial life technologies, the concept of nature has also come to embrace the genetically modified and the artificially created. Thus nature has come to incorporate what in its original definition it was not: the technological, human-made, artificially simulated unnatural. So nature is now inclusive of both the real and the virtual. It is both our ‘homely’ habitat and our unheimlich, uncanny surroundings. It is unstable and multi-layered because it is constantly changing as a result of our intervention. Nature, therefore, whether organic or technologically reproduced, is a means to expose identity and allow the viewer to see themself performing as the ‘other’.
