The Accelerated Sublime: Thrill-Seeking Adventure Heroes in the Commodified Landscape

Deploying Cultural Knowledge of Nature to Construct the Nature Sports Experience

“…It has been suggested that experiences filtered through culture may be lesser than sensorial, embodied experiences because nature embedded with cultural meaning by the tourism industry can render it passive, inert, or inauthentic (Booth, 2019; Ponting, 2017). This is also consistent with the idea that the tourism industry reproduces essentialized versions of nature (Bell & Lyall, 2002; Ponting & McDonald, 2013), and further highlights the value of better understanding the role of cultural knowledge in the lived experience of nature.…”

“…The agency of the tourism sector to create worlds within the natural environment is a feature of the nature sports context. The tourism industry, sports and travel media, and popular culture draw heavily on the romantic view of nature (Canniford & Shankar, 2013) to imbue it with cultural values and codes such as the “sublime,” remote,” “wild,” “transcendent,” and “authentic” (Bell & Lyall, 2002; Ford & Brown, 2006). Infusing nature with values is used to evoke ideas of escape, thrill, pleasure, and self-fulfillment (Frost, 2021; Laing & Crouch, 2009).…”

“Beyond Their Actual Limits”: Immersion, Interactivity, and the Virtual Sublime in Burke and Video Games

“…Nevertheless, the history of the sublime reveals that the concept has a long association with immersion, virtuality, artificiality, and even action. The Romantic conception of the sublime not only prioritized immersive and unmediated engagement with natural environments (Wilson, 2017) but also gave birth to modern tourism (Bell & Lyall, 2002). New visual and architectural techniques were developed to create a virtual sense of infinity through the limited space of paintings and structures (Etlin, 2012), which was later augmented by the new technology of the panorama (Ibata, 2018).…”