Parks as performance: wilderness and colonial ecological violence in ‘The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks'

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2016, Google launched ‘The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks’, an interactive digital platform, hosted through Google Arts & Culture and produced in collaboration with the National Park Service, that offers virtual explorations of some of the most remote parts of several United States National Parks. In this article I argue that Hidden Worlds is more than an innocuous, interactive tour of fascinating geological and biological features. It is a performance ingrained with ideologies that have severe consequences for how we understand social and ecological injustice on the land that is now part of the national parks system. I use an ecocritical approach to examine the immersive experience of Hidden Worlds as performance and ultimately demonstrate that it enacts colonial ecological violence.