Girot / Truninger Landscript 1: Landscape Vision Motion

Visual Thinking in Landscape Culture
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-3-86859-906-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Landscript

Landscript 1: Landscape Vision Motion widmet sich dem grundlegenden Wandel des Visuellen, der sich im Zeitalter der „digitalen Revolution“ vollzieht. Experten aus verschiedenen Disziplinen thematisieren den Einfluss von Film und Video auf die gegenwärtige Theorie der Landschaft. Was lässt sich in einem interdisziplinären, theoretischen Austausch über den Landschaftsraum in Bewegung sagen? Lässt sich von einer neuen visuellen Kultur in der Landschaftsarchitektur sprechen?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Girot, Christophe

Truninger, Fred

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Allgemeines
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur

Leseproben

Foreword Christophe Girot This first issue of Landscript, entitled Landscape Vision Motion, brings together knowledge from different professions, influencing the evolution of landscape thinking—such as architecture, film, video, sociology, geography, and history. It is a collection of ideas about landscape, taking effect not only at the level of planning and design, but also of vision and image making. The interaction between landscape and image has evolved over the course of history, with progress in visual thinking in many cases setting a conceptual precedent in anticipation of design. Landscape traditions have often relied on a combination of word and image to brand landscapes with deeper symbolic meaning. But the present medial condition does not reflect the immense impact of digital reality on our collective perception of landscape. A deep schism has arisen between established forms of pictorial convention in landscape, and the substantive dematerialization of our imagination through time-based media. Landscript is here just to remind us of the intricacies in our way of seeing, thinking, and projecting. Landscape Vision Motion is an anthology opened by Charles Waldheim. In his text, he asserts that mapping and cartography have gradually reached the limits of their own success. He proposes that the use of video and a new form of landscape representation, which he calls “animation through sequential photography,” could yield a better sense of social and political relevance. In the second contribution to the book, Eelco Hooftman points to his practice’s visualization technique as a creative argument on the role of the visual and emotional in contemporary landscape representation. In doing so, he contributes a clear statement from the core of the discipline. Janike Kampevold Larsen urges for a more critical approach to the contemporary practice of landscape measuring. According to Larsen, the area pertaining to the present-day study of landscape is often some sort of “middle ground”—quoting a term David Leatherbarrow introduced to the theoretical debate. This middle ground is considered neither a design process, which tends to focus on smaller units, nor a total constructed vista of picturesque landscape based on perspective. Elena Cogato Lanza looks at mapping and calls for a return to proximity as a factor of future town and landscape planning. She takes into consideration examples of the Grand Pari(s) de l’agglomération parisienne, the international consultation on the future of the Paris agglomeration, using an approach that she coins “design criticism.” In the text that follows, Frédéric Pousin argues for a reintroduction of crossings and sections. He pleads for a reconsideration of the urban transect because its basic relationship to space is about the route. Instead of totalizing the global vision of the map, the transect bears a clear directionality and often takes the form of a performative, experiential act—it evades any preconceived “territorial a priori” thus leaving the field open to new ideas and views about the urban landscape. In his text Panoramique—Panning over Landscapes, Volker Pantenburg concentrates on a certain filmic technique to discuss a “taxonomy of the pan,” which is based on a deliberate choice of filmic examples, tracing its origins and potentials. Christian Schmid draws parallels from film akin to Henri Lefebvre’s famous theory of space in his La production de l’espace (1974) and corroborates with examples of Swiss film of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, especially Reisender Krieger (Traveling Warrior) by Christian Schocher. This medium seems not only appropriate to depict the qualities of the “lived space,” as Lefebvre calls one of its three dimensions, but it represents—in Lefebvre’s own terms—what cannot be fully explained through any other analytical tool. Robin Curtis discusses two avant-garde films with an interpretation of the “self,” as laid out theoretically by Eric Neisser. She demonstrates how much potential film as medium offers its viewers in terms of representing the embodied self in a flow of images. Finally, Sébastien Marot presents the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who shows a rare filmic concern by taking a close look at how cities, towns, and landscapes are perceived and developed in the politics of design. In preparation to this book, the Landscape-Video Conference Blicklandschaften, organized by the Chair of Professor Christophe Girot, was held at the Semper Aula of the ETH Zurich May 14–15, 2010. International experts from various professional backgrounds discussed contemporary visual theory in reference to landscape. This conference was designed as a place not only to discuss, but also to experience visual representations of landscape. An exhibition shared the student work from the Chair’s Media Lab and offered an exceptional experiential event in the form of a giant Camera Obscura booth. Thanks to this installation, visitors to the Polyterrasse of ETH Zurich had the rare chance to catch a glimpse into the past of human perception. The booth had been assembled at the edge of this vast public terrace, overlooking the city from an elevated point of view. The image produced by the Camera Obscura moved slowly around, panning over the city, the entire terrace, and the main building of the ETH. Upon entering the dark box of the Camera Obscura, visitors witnessed a live reflection of the city projected on a large convex shaped disk, and could also hear a live transmission of sounds from Zurich: the box operated a rotating turret on top of the chamber enhanced by a large lens and an acoustic ear. This ancient mode of looking at the landscape was coupled in motion with another optical canon inherited from the history of landscape vision: the filmic pan(orama). Even though the image reflected on the disk showed nothing but the immediate surroundings, this archaic visual act—always in motion—called into question the manner in which we actually perceive and pay attention to our environment. This unusual piece of world viewing facilitated by an elaborate technical installation served as a reminder, both historical and aesthetic, of a long tradition in landscape visualization. If ways of seeing the world change and evolve with each period of history, what is there left to learn about a contemporary art of looking at landscape in the digital age? The goal of Landscript is to reflect critically on how visual thinking can operate when the single painterly image defining a landscape can no longer play the cardinal role it used to. Digital media, far from being fixed, is evanescent and allows for countless electronic images and messages to stream and collide in a constant flux of impressions without a specific point of reference. Such an absence of perspective provokes a spatial dislocation of the landscape image we carry in us. This de-nucleation of the landscape image through media, has significantly weakened the foundations of a long pictorial heritage. The challenge in the advent of digital media and film—and its widespread diffusion in society—is not so much to comment on these changes in terms of visual parameters; but rather to understand what effect it will have on the particular attention we grant to landscapes and their making. This only partly explains why a broad disinterest in landscape aesthetics has gripped our society. What landscape actually lacks now is a clear symbolic order, in light of all the priorities we have piled onto it—namely energy, food supply, transport, and ecology to mention but a few. Because of the generalized medial shift in a global visual culture, the field of landscape design and aesthetics is in dire need of a new and stronger qualitative definition. With Landscape Vision Motion, an open scholarly series of publications is being launched, which will critically discuss the significance of landscape aesthetics through an established intellectual tradition ranging from philosophy and history, to design theory and film science. It will address the spatial realm we live in—with its distortion, divergence, and relativity resulting from the duplicity of transport and motion— and its impact on landscape perception. This book would not have been possible without support from the Swiss Cooperation Programme in Architecture (SCPA). I think particularly of Professor Dr. Pierro Martinoli, who headed the SCPA project, Professor Dr. Ralf Eichler President of the ETH Zurich, who was part of the Governing Board, Professor Dr. Luca Orteli, director of the Institute of Architecture at the EPFL, and Dr. Elena Cogato Lanza for her great collaborative effort on this project. For the Blicklandschaften event staged at the ETH in 2010, I wish to acknowledge the team from the Media Lab: Dr. Fred Truniger for the organization of the conference; Dr. Sabine Wolf and Susanne Hofer for the organization of the exhibition and the publication of Cadrages II with its DVD; and Nadine Schütz, who led the Camera Obscura audio visual installation in collaboration with the Chair of Quantum Optics of the ETH and the ICST Institute of Contemporary Sound at the HGK Z. My gratitude also to all the other members of the Chair who made the final installation of this exhibition possible despite...

Über Autor(innen)

Christophe Girot / Fred Truniger (Hg.) (Bd. 1) Christophe Girot / Albert Kirchengast (Hg.) (Reihe)

Christophe Girot / Fred Truniger (Hg.) (Bd. 1) Christophe Girot / Albert Kirchengast (Hg.) (Reihe)