Written by Akela Craig, May 13, 2026
What does it mean to experience nature in an age when experience itself is increasingly mediated by technology? In contemporary visual culture, our attention is increasingly channeled by screens, digital media, and algorithmically-generated imagery. As society negotiates the recent consequences of AI fatigue, the aftermath of the pandemic, the advent of social media, and decades of media saturation, direct encounters with the natural world have diminished in what writer and lepidopterist Robert M. Pyle describes as an “extinction of experience.”
In another article titled “Extinction of experience: the loss of human–nature interactions,” Masashi Soga and Kevin J. Gaston argue that–driven by technological advancements and the emergence of sedentary pastimes, among other triggers–outdoor experiences with nature are increasingly being displaced by “virtual alternatives.” They further suggest that this decline in direct interaction with nature not only reduces emotional affinity toward the natural world but also has weakened pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, producing what they describe as a “cycle of disaffection toward nature.” This loss of direct contact does not eliminate interest in nature; instead, it has prompted a renewed and evolving artistic engagement with the natural world.
Mulgil Kim, Spring Clouds, 2026
As live experience declines, nature is increasingly encountered through mediated forms–screens, images, and immersive constructed environments. In this context, the natural world has re-emerged as a critical site for artistic engagement, but often in forms shaped by these conditions, where visual intensity and simulated experience begin to stand in for direct access.
This shift invites comparison to Romanticism, which emerged under similarly transformative conditions. Romanticism reflected a collective artistic desire to return to the sublime in nature, to intense emotion, and to individualism. Contemporary artists, however, respond not to the Industrial Revolution but to a reality heavily filtered through screens, digital media, AI, and virtual environments. This response might be termed Neo-Romanticism, a movement characterized by hyperreal, surreal, and augmented depictions of the natural world. Artists working within this framework employ approaches ranging from highly detailed natural depictions to highly augmented, surreal, or hyperreal interventions.
Within digital and new media art practice, nature has also emerged as an increasingly visible and aestheticized subject. Artists such as Refik Anadol produce large-scale, data-driven installations that circulate within museums and digital platforms as immersive experiences. These works are often shaped by spectacle, immersion, and technological novelty, and align with a cultural desire for visually captivating, screen-based encounters with nature. While the novelty and spectacle of digital art is on the rise, there is a marked growth in interest in landscape paintings and surrealist engagement with nature.
A range of artists whose work engages with the natural world can be traced by varying degrees of mediation–from sober depictions of landscapes to highly surrealized, augmented visions. Rather than a stylistic category, this spectrum should be understood as a shift in the degree to which nature is observed, altered, or reconstructed. Each artist engages with nature employing varying levels of sobriety, distortion, and surrealism. When mediated online, many naturescapes appear computer-generated. Is this a testament to the artist’s mastery of realism, or indicative of a need to compete with our simulated reality?
“We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us-because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand-the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests-the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature-only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value-leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand.” (Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pg.153)