Project by Komninou Maria Eleni, Zhao Yifan, Zhu Yiqing

What does it mean to revisit a landscape that has already been seen, framed, and circulated countless times?

Our relationship with landscapes has always been mediated: Landscape means both the physical terrain and features that make up an environment as well as its depiction through a medium, mainly drawing, painting and photography… Through recent developments in imaging technologies, the depiction of natural landscapes is shifting from representation to simulation. Technologies such as satellite images, remote sensing, earth observation technologies allow us to sense and see landscapes from new vantage points and at spectral frequencies, while computational modelling and simulations allow us to compute and visualize the resulting data in unseen ways. Digital models no longer just depict the environment, through forestry and landscape preservation, they start to actively reshape it, blurring the boundary between natural and artificial. On the ground, the proliferation and democratization of image making and sharing technologies, from drones and go-pro cameras, to smartphones and social media, is leading to an equally impactful depiction of natural landscapes. Natural landscapes become destinations for tourists, traveling to picturesque scenes, fueled by chasing so-called unique image opportunities. As such the visual regimes provided by digital imaging technologies are crucial for both the monitoring and preservation of natural landscapes as driving their commodification through tourism.

The nine original views of Yosemite are not just scenic lookouts but foundational images that helped produce the idea of wilderness. These views, first captured through painting and photography, played a critical role in both preserving Yosemite, ultimately helping persuade Congress in 1864 to pass the Yosemite Grant. What was preserved was not just the environment of the national park, but the actual views, indicating the crucial role of the idealized picturesque image in landscape preservation activities. Being depicted in paintings, these images did not just enable the legal groundwork for preservation, they also started the commodification of the landscape through images. Today, the nine views are still impacting the physical landscape of Yosemite, while not exactly the same, physical signs and viewing decks indicate their positions, in addition to being named, labelled and displayed on must see lists and maps. In addition to these original views, these same sites are layered with new forms of mediation including satellite images, drone footage, climate data, 360° images, digital simulations, and social media feeds. The image no longer merely reflects the landscape but shapes how it is accessed, understood, consumed and protected. As the role of the image shifts from a static representation to a dynamic tool of surveillance, branding, and environmental modelling, Yosemite becomes both an object of care and a site of extraction. These layered perspectives reveal how images now operate not just to preserve nature, but to reprogram it, asking us to reconsider what it means to see, to frame, and to intervene in the landscape.