The boundless horizons that the Internet has opened up for those who use it — artists, writers, bloggers, curators, mothers, grandparents — can be fairly described as a wilderness. In fact, though we don't necessarily realize it, we have adopted the language of natural space to talk about this online realm. As artist, curator, and writer Nicholas O'Brien reminded me recently, as computer users, "we have the Safari web browser, we have windows, Windows Vista… we surf the web like we would surf a wave." This language has infiltrated how we talk about virtual space as well as our visual vernacular — "We borrow from the natural," O'Brien continued. "We use it for our desktop backgrounds and for our screensavers."

I immediately thought back to the default background of Windows XP, a vision of natural splendor, rolling green hills against a bright blue sky spotted with white clouds, so perfect that it looks computer-generated.

O'Brien, who is based out of Chicago's burgeoning Internet art and new media scene and currently teaches at the University of Colorado, looked more than a little harried perched on a low couch at 319 Scholes, a garage space in Bushwick that has become a locus of New York's digital art community. Transparent, circular glasses askew and hands in the pockets of a moss-green hoodie, O'Brien had agreed to meet me after a long day of gallery preparation for a "nature walk" through his still-under-construction group exhibition, "Notes on a New Nature," a show that examines how artists are confronting long-held artistic ideas about the natural and the landscape through digital art (the completed show opens tonight).

The exhibition is the culmination of long-term research that was kicked off for O'Brien at a lecture by T.J. Clarke in 2008. The famed art historian said that as a pupil of Pissarro, Cezanne was repainting his master's work, but "found that Pissarro was missing a lot in his landscapes. Clarke claimed that he was specifically missing the virtual qualities of the landscape," as opposed to the space's literal visuality, O'Brien recounted. "This immediately rang a huge bell in my head." "Artists are still attempting to capture these virtual qualities of landscape… in digital works that were being made in the past five or ten years," he said. O'Brien started a Tumblr blog, also called Notes on a New Nature, to collect works that he saw dealing with these issues — several artists featured on the blog are included in the exhibition.

Within 319 Scholes, "Notes on a New Nature" is arranged into three zones. The front room and hallway feature the show's print works, which include photographs by Sherwin Rivera Tibayan in which the artist appropriates postcard imagery, turns it into digital projections, and re-photographs it, as well as a Zen-simple but strangely claustrophobic lo-resolution polygon image of a potted plant on a desk and a window with a blank virtual landscape outside, "Still Life" (2010) by Michael Ray-Von.

A wall-size projection takes up most of the space's back room with a video game by Wes Wilson in which players control their mower-equipped avatar to trim an infinitely large lawn. Among the other works in the space is Nicolas Sassoon's "Fidji" (2011) projection (which had to be turned back on with the help of a ladder, and a keyboard plugged into the computer mounted on the ceiling), a hypnotic ovoid animation with alternating bands of pixelated blue color, like a waterfall sliced into sections. The horizontal sections expand and contract gradually. The piece was designed in response to the shape of the windows from a building Sassoon has been studying in France; the artist decided to animate the architect's desire that the windows create a visual embrace with the sea. For those used to seeing Sassoon's works on a computer screen, the piece's churning physical presence is powerful.

A gallery of projected works takes over the space's basement. One highlight is a poetic collection of eight videos by Chicago-based artist Theo Darst. O'Brien recounted how the artist felt a little lost on a residency in the rural Midwest until he "fell in love with the landscape," and created these "Earth Arts," videos of natural landscapes embedded with singular rotating abstract polygonal shapes, contrasting and complementing their organic contexts.

When asked about the "new" in "Notes on a New Nature," O'Brien explained that "the new is the digital, and the way the digital reflects on the virtual" qualities of landscape. "Yet the new is not new, it's something we've been looking at for a long time" — from cave paintings to Cezanne and on. "The newness is this paradox that we're facing of representing landscape, this thing that's supposed to be natural, physical, optic, and haptic, but we're representing it in this medium that's not those things," the curator said. "The paradox that we see between the digital and the physical no longer seems relevant to me."

That decontextualized Windows XP background is just as much of a natural landscape as the vista pictured in a Monet, or an Ansel Adams photograph, or a kitschy postcard. It's up to the artists in the exhibition, connected by O'Brien's slowly developed and highly researched curating (a rarity among new media shows), to demonstrate to us that we already live in this new nature.

"Notes on a New Nature," curated by Nicholas O'Brien, opens tonight, Thursday, November 10, at 319 Scholes gallery (319 Scholes Street in Brooklyn).

*DOWNLOADING*

— INFINITE QUEST: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" is the latest in a series of open-world role-playing games in which the player is freee to do almost anything they choose. "Skyrim" will be the largest game in the series, but it's possible that developers will never be able to top its scale — the game is infinitely long. Developer Todd Howard told Wired.com that the game is "something that you can play forever," with an infinite amount of randomly-generated quests that will see players running errands for shopkeepers, killing thieves, and stealing treasure. A video game that never ends, with a continuously-refreshed list of new, mundane tasks to fulfill. Pretty life-like, huh?