UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles - Users - UCLA

1. Introduction
1.1. Background
New technologies, particularly data collection and geographic mapping
technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS), geographic
information systems (GIS), and remote sensing, have produced complex
concepts of place/space and blurred the physical and virtual boundaries of
nature, the perceptions of geometry, ecological issues, and geopolitical
paradigms. Place/space now exists as a mobile sphere where physical and
virtual realms cross each other and create different perspectives. Within
such an infinite and abstruse context, the fixed boundaries of time/space
do not exist and nature is not limited solely to traditional ecological
environment frameworks concerning issues of global warming,
overpopulation, and vanishing species. Space/place is no longer a fixed
physical scene. Rather, within this conceptualization, space is more about
the landscape made, created, and recreated by humans and their social,
economical, and cultural activities.
Figure 1. Hans Haacke,
Wind and Water Sculpture,
Tri-Quarterly Supplement,
1967
According to Paul Virilio, “Landscape has no fixed meaning, no
privileged vantage point. It is oriented only by the itinerary of the
passerby.” 1 Landscape is a complex experience constituted not by one’s
cultural, economic, political and technological environment that is
differently distributed and conceived in different parts of the world but by
individuals themselves. So there can be various ways to interpret the
meaning of landscape. The traditional landscape art genre was radically
transformed in the 1960s, when many artists stopped merely representing
the land, and new technologies, such as video, spread out to public.
1
Virilio, Paul, Translated by Julie Rose. A Landscape of Events. MIT Press, 2000, p xi
* The title, A Landscape of Events, is from this book.
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