GAM 07 is out and it looks incredibly beautiful. The subtitle is ‘“Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape.” My essay “Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects” is in there. Thanks to Klaus Loenhart, Ingrid Boeck and the other marvelous editors.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Zero Landscape: Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape
GAM 07 is out and it looks incredibly beautiful. The subtitle is ‘“Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape.” My essay “Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects” is in there. Thanks to Klaus Loenhart, Ingrid Boeck and the other marvelous editors.
thanks for this link. looks great.
ReplyDeleteregarding your "landscape is a painting" critique, check out this essay by geographer JB Jackson. That definition of landscape is impoverished.
I know that essay. I'm far less sanguine that a new and improved definition of landscape will change the basic problem.
ReplyDeleteperhaps- it is certainly a problematic and ambiguous word.
ReplyDeletenonetheless, saying "it's a painting" seems to me neither true nor useful. It's grabbing a common usage at a particular moment in time (which has passed- which isn't to say it's completely irrelevant), decontextualizing it, and using it for rhetorical purposes. 50 years ago the notion that an ecology could exist in an urban area would have seemed an anachronistic and absurd definition.
i'd be interested to know if you think "landscapes" exist (in the way that buildings do, not in the way that objects do)?
I'm not sure that they do, rather I suspect that it might best be defined as a phenomenon (always contingent and ephemeral), resulting from the combination of specific human and non-human practices (surveying, hammering, deposition, cultivating, walking, etc). And the human/non-human dichotomy also seems fundamental to landscape (as it does for a building, or an ipad).