Reetta Mehtonen: Neighborhood Waters: A video-ethnographic exploration of nature’s intrinsic value (2023)
You can view the video from this link: Reetta Mehtonen (2023).
This essay explores what can be known about nature through a short ethnographic video filmed on the ocean bay of Arabia neighborhood. The video project and ethnographic field work around it aims to showcase visually the constraints of observing and documenting nature in its intrinsic value. My research question is how does nature’s intrinsic value exists? I will particularly focus on how does water site’s intrinsic value exists on screen and analyze the discourses about value of “screened nature”. Intrinsic value of nature refers to both the concept of nature having value “in itself” and for “its own sake” (Zimmerman & Brandley 2019); in other words, a value without anthropogenic dependencies and uses. In conservation politics and motives, nature is often depicted to possess an intrinsic value or it is viewed as a certain end goal of the discourse (Piccolo 2017, 8, 11), yet on screen nature is often produced and viewed within three extrinsic values: educational, entertainment and/or environmental (Aufderheide 2007, 136-141). With this video project, I wanted to experiment the limitations of video-ethnographic eyes to observe water sites in their intrinsic value; the short film aims to showcase the limits of ‘our eyes’ to capture and hold memory of nature in its habitat and changes. The project was inspired by the contrast I find in mass media documentation of nature as something with an entertaining value rather than for the sake of appreciation of its intrinsic value.
The chosen video-ethnographic eyes
The short film comprises of seven clips of still seeming videos from seven days as well as a short introduction and ending clip. I filmed each of the clips around nine o’clock to delimit possible effects of the timing of the day for things such as light or shoreline species behavior. I planned each of the clips to last on average 20 seconds which I found to be a time that showcases enough of the chosen site per day and still falls under the course assignment’s time restrictions. I was quite unsure how to film an ethnographic video about nature, especially when my approach was to investigate the nature’s value in a sense without humans. I questioned how could the shore line exists without my influence. My first, maybe even naïve, thought was to aim to seamless edit of clips without shifts of camera or break from the stillness of the chosen site. Yet I came to soon realize that the approach was impossible firstly because of my filming equipment and lack of experience as a videographer. Secondly, and maybe more importantly, by trying to mask my own presence in the video, I realized that I am not only drifting away from ethnography, but also neglecting the video project’s main aim which was to explore and showcase the limits of our eyes to nature. Instead of aiming for “cleanliness” and overtly felt control on the video, I wanted to emphasize also the behind-the-scenes of documenting the nature for the realization of a perspective. I chose to do it by visually presenting myself in the film as the person whose chosen frame will be shown and also by leaving the messy and maybe cinematography-wise unprofessional setting and unsetting of the camera on the film.
Conflicts of the accustomed eyes
Sarah Pink broadly defines a video as ethnographic when it comprises of ethnographic interest for the production of knowledge of the particular topic and for the processing of that knowledge (Pink 2007). She finds that video as a research method is not only an audiovisual recording; the researcher rather engages to the “process through which knowledge is produced” in its appropriated cultural contexts (Pink 2007, 11/24). My research questions posed me difficulties not only in how should the topic be approached in ethnography, but further how could something intrinsic be visually determined. I could see my own accustoms and learned concepts of waters influence how I was producing visual material. When I started to design what, where and how to film, I realized that I was in deep conflict with the “how” the water site should look in the video. Not only did I possess an idea of what intrinsically valuable nature should look like on screen, but I also found it difficult to surpass the want to emulate nature as a narrated spectacle on the screen. As an avid wildlife film watcher, I have noticed similarly to Louson that contemporary wildlife films, used synonymously as nature documentaries, often focus on capturing rarity, specialty and the spectacular events of nature through exciting narrations and accompanied with grand music (Louson 2018, 48-53). In case of trying to capture intrinsic value of the water site, I also came across the problematic that I was unintentionally posing the intrinsic value of nature by my chosen framing to be opposite of “the spectacle” and “a narration”, because it felt opposite to the cultural experience of screened nature. The video project seemed to have become a search of an experience of difference for the viewer through the frame of illusionary stillness and invisible changes of nature, and consequently distancing the realms of human felt nature and nature felt nature. Then from another perspective, it could be also argued, that the first impression of my video exactly emulates the recent cultural and scientific discussions and speculations about waters having calming, healing and relaxing effects for humans in its pure existence (Georgiou et al. 2022; Martinez 2022). Yet I argue that even though the documentation of nature in an ethnographic video can in a sense fail to capture intrinsic value of nature without problematics, it is able to evoke cultural experience different in comparison to a “nature documentary” by highlighting the messiness and relationality of human experience about nature and the limits of imaginative knowledge about it.
Knowing about screened nature and beyond
The video besides its intended experience of the limitations of the eyes and illusionary stillness found in the water site is able to produce different sorts of knowledge which I argue to be dependable on how and how many times the video is watched. As video is an audiovisual source of knowledge, its best captured aspects are on the visuals of the chosen water site, what sort of sounds are heard at the set timing of a clip and how the view in its illusionary stillness is on the move all the time. The visuals show the landscape’s managed rocky beaches and human habituated shorelines. The audio captures a messy recording from birds singing to construction site machines banging. Even though movement is captured in the video, the full sensory experience of the bay is absent, which is why I decided to write short ethnographic descriptions for each day’s clip to capture the other senses and to avoid the viewer to have to concentrate on the lack of other senses too much.
Yet what sort of knowledge about the intrinsic value is transferable actually through my video? How does the water site exist “in itself” and for “its own sake”? I find that the intrinsic value cannot purely exists on a video due to it being an insufficient method to capture the full sensory experience of nature. That said, I do find that the affective experience of intrinsic value of the water site can exists via screened nature. There are three things that the video particularly evokes in my opinion that are important for the affective realization of intrinsic. First is that the water site appears and re-appears on the screen indifferently to assumptions, guesses or wants over what it would look like. The water site’s existence on a screen itself does not produce intrinsic value on it, but I believe that the series of clips is able to show that nature exists for its own sake. It is also realized in my made movements on the video; the nature is indifferent in its existence to whether I am there to capture it. Secondly, the video shows partials of worlds in its shortness, narrowness of frames and non-narrativeness of soundscapes. The viewer is left with an affective feeling of incompletion which I argue to showcase the unachievable grandeur of water site’s networks. With multiple watches and going through my notes on the soundscapes, I still could hear and see more and new every time. Thus, tightly framed and non-narrative- seeking screening of nature can approach to showcase some aspects how nature exists in itself.
Finally, the emotions and affects felt to the water site’s chosen frame can reveal underlying sentiments about nature’s existence. I argue that the feelings through which we problematize intrinsic value can tell evident matters on what is intrinsic value in “otherness” as nature for humans. While watching the video, I repetitively kept thinking whether the video was too boring, not beautiful enough or too narrow in the depictions of the site. The uncomfortableness of uncontrol and freedom over the water site’s existence on screen can indicate the borders of knowledge about nature, but also that intrinsic value is something associated with freedom and untouchability.
Conclusion: the inventing of nature
Based on this video-ethnographic research, screened nature seems to always exists in certain limitations of the videographer’s ethos and perspectives. Nature on screen is a form on invented nature that cannot detain a pure idea of intrinsic value of nature, because whoever holds the camera will intentionally or unintentionally create a narrative. Besides this, I still argue that through specific videographic approaches which aim to showcase both the presence and co-existences of humans among nature can affectively create notions in which nature is realized within its autonomous rights and existences as well as in the connectivity of the Earth’s creatures’ relations. In the video, the water site is filmed from the clear touches of my eyes, and literally hands adjusting the camera, but I find that the video also creates a momentarily glimpse to the realities that both connect humans to nature and also distinct humans from a certain nature. It is both politically and ethically necessary to understand that in order for something intrinsically valuable to exist, it can be beyond the absolute comprehension of an anthropogenic understanding. The possibilities of nature’s intrinsic value to exists on screen are more in the un-staging and undressing the spectacles filmed “outside” the anthropogene; nature exists within a network and thus no intrinsic can exists if proper relations are not found or rather displayed. Yet there should be no aims to oppose nature to humans in order to extract ideology of intrinsic value in nature. Through this video-ethnographic project I would rather suggest that research should discover further the boundaries of what perspectives humans can attain about nature and how the un-known parts of the nature are being presented as knowledge.
References
Aufderheide, Patricia. 2007. “Nature”. Documentary Film : a Very Short Introduction. Oxford ;: Oxford University Press. pp.136-144.
Georgiou, M., Tieges, Z., Morison, G. et al. 2022. “A population-based retrospective study of the modifying effect of urban blue space on the impact of socioeconomic deprivation on mental health, 2009–2018.” Sci Rep 12, 13040 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17089-z
Louson, Eleanor. 2018. “Taking Spectacle Seriously: Wildlife Film and the Legacy of Natural History Display”. Never Before Seen: Spectacle, Staging, and Story in Wildlife film’s Blue-Chip Renaissance. Doctoral Dissertation, York University, Toronto. pp 47-79. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188194516.pdf
Martinez, Shandra. 2022. “What is Blue Mind Theory?” MI Blue Perspectives. Accessed May 12, 2023, published January 26, 2022. https://www.mibluesperspectives.com/stories/for-your-business/what-is-blue-mind-theory
Piccolo, John J. 2017. “Intrinsic value in nature: objective good or simply half of an unhelpful dichotomy?” Journal for Nature Conversation, volume 27, June 2017. pp 8-11. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1617138117300742#sec0010
Pink, Sarah. 2007. “Video in ethnographic research.” Doing Visual Ethnography Images, Media and Representation in Research. 2nd ed. London: SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/978085702502
Michael J. Zimmerman & Ben Bradley. 2019. “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed May 12, 2023, Published January 9, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/
This multimodal work was created as part of the course YMA-3203 Cosmology and Knowledge.