Noise in the landscape: Disputing the visibility of mundane technological objects (original) (raw)
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We have lost an important connection with the landscape, a way of seeing and understanding its profound significance in our everyday life and culture. This gap in our knowledge is the consequence of a rationalist paradigm that continues to dominate western thinking, a conceptual void that threatens the landscape in the face of 21st century challenges. An alternative philosophical approach argues that refocusing attention on materiality and re-evaluating the relationship communities have with the land would be an important step towards addressing the problem, but it does demand a very different role and agenda for philosophy. This chapter illustrates the potential of a new way of thinking about landscape, consciousness and design and aims to initiate a new discourse by abandoning the philosophical filters that currently obscure a meaningful engagement with the built environment. This would help to establish an expanded definition of landscape as a vital means of achieving a better quality of life and robust sustainable development.
Modern Landscapes and the Politics of Place
Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, 1982
Four Insights about Landscapes I have for about fifteen years looked at, photographed, read about and otherwise examined landscapes over much of the western world, so I suppose that by now I should be some sort of authority. By landscapes I mean pretty well everything seen or otherwise sensed outdoors-rural, urban, industrial, or natural-and I am deeply curious about why they look as they do. Had I devoted my energies to biology, economics or psychology I could well be an expert on some specialized field within my discipline, receiving large grants to support fundamental research and regularly consulted by politicians and the talk-show hosts of local radio shows for my opinions. But the study of landscape is not like biology or economics. In those disciplines it is legitimate to plunge deeply into matters, to analyze a detail through the tunnel vision of microscope or economic theory. For landscape this is palpably impossible: the best one can do is to range over the surface of things, keeping one's eyes open, attending to interconnections, and trying not to deny wholeness. The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that, while rigor in the physical sciences demands an attention to exactness, in the human or social sciences being rigorous requires that the inexactness of the subject should be respected (Heidegger, 1977, 119-120). So too with landscape-a rigorous understanding has to avoid any tendency to define, constrain, analyze and specialize in details, for these destroy the very thing one seeks to comprehend by breaking it into bits. With landscape there can be no experts and no authorities, only more careful observations and more thoughtful interpretations.
Occupied Peripheries: Rethinking Landscape in the Anthropocene Visuality
LUP Student Papers, 2018
Although landscape representations in the US-European culture have traditionally been acknowledged as a peaceful ordering of the world or the tool of imperialism, nationalism and private property (sometimes all simultaneously), a new shift in the landscape scopic regime seems to be happening. Produced by the current rise of concerns around climate change and environmental crisis, this shift seems to be related to a specific attention to land use and land value. In other words, instead of focusing on aesthetical conventions and on an idealisation of nature, the landscape is perceived as a relationship between human’s socio-political activities and the nature where they take place. However, it is legitimate to ask how the aesthetical aspects of these new landscapes are constructed and wonder if it is possible to evade such problematic history. In this context, where landscape topic is studied by different disciplines like art history and visual studies but also geography, anthropology and political ecology, the landscape definitions are diverted by activists and artists addressing subjects like the Anthropocene and the commons. This thesis analyses two European artists’ video essays: Deep Weather by Ursula Biemann and Everything is coming together, while everything is following apart: the ZAD by Oliver Ressler. Their works, that have in common to depict peripheral occupied landscapes, are compared and interpreted, with the objective to discuss their different approaches. Applying theoretical tools as Nicolas Mirzoeff’s visuality and Trevor Paglen’s concept of experimental geography, the two artists’ positions will be questioned: from the view from above to the people in the field, from the global to the local, from the observer to the viewer. These two artists offer landscapes, understood as a space and as its representation, that reveal the pointlessness of the war on nature and how communal activities could be a first step to rethink the relationship between human and nature.