European Renaissance and Romantic landscape appeared in vistas. The conditions of the industrial revolution and, according to Patrick Maynard and Jonathon Crary, the film camera especially, led to a Modernist re-vision vividly recorded in Xavier Herbert’s contrary Modernist vision, prompted by seeing the Australian bush, its ‘... stunted trees, the mulga and the wilga and the gimlet gum, doing a kind of dance, spinning past, seeming to swing away from the train to the horizon and race ahead, to come back...the same set of trees in endless gyration’.
Space at the coincidence of ‘landscape’ and ‘human’ is being radically refigured in contemporary photomedia to deal with being; noun and verb. Practice by Australians Daniel Crooks, David Stephenson, Kristian Haggblom and Marian Drew, and my own, positions a third figure, the self, in our confounding landscape.
Drawing on the theories of phenomenology, 'ecological psychology' and psychogeography, we explore by analogy the way our articulated body, mobile head, and socketed eyes concert to search our space. Condensing space with time creates a visceral awareness of the environment; the scratching thorns as much as the soaring treetops. From a revealed connection between body and environment come signs of mind and attention.
Emerging Landscapes Conference is a joint venture of the School of Architecture and the Built Environment and the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster
Publication classification
E3.1 Extract of paper
Copyright notice
2010, University of Westminster
Related work
DU:30040669;DU:30040672
Title of proceedings
Emerging Landscapes Conference : Between production and representation