Establishing Established: Reversed Remediation in Broersen and Lukács’ ‘Establishing Eden’

Abstract

Artists Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács, reveal the way the New Zealand landscape is appropriated by Hollywood movies such as ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit.’ In Establishing Eden (2016), the viewer becomes trapped in a perpetual establishing shot through a collage of two-dimensional photographic clips. Eventually, it displays the naked structure of how Establishing Eden is constructed from flat database images taken from the ‘library’ of a digital video editing program. Whilst some of the scenery images maintain a coherent illusion of an unspoiled landscape by using the structure of a tracking shot, the flipping image clips reveal a two-dimensional diorama. Therefore, looking at Establishing Eden with this oscillation in mind, the film seems to produce what Ruskin might mean with his “third way” of treating a surface. The depth of its conventional structure shines through the exposed flatness of the image. In this paper, I relate Broersen and Lukács’ work to my notion of reversed remediation in which hypermediacy generates an oscillation space between what Bolter and Grusin call remediation and reversed remediation.