Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Is There a Digital Future
Landscape Terrain?
Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo speculate on a future landscape enriched by digital
culture. Rather than provide sanctuary or comfort zones in the event of global environmental
collapse, laser\net is a model for exploring landscape terrains that establish ‘agora’-like
meeting places as a basis for electronic exchange and progression. Re-mix platforms thus
become collaborative sites for all who seek to engage in this rurality.
Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its
surfaces for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, like
they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the
carcasses of little worth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, Essay on Photography, 1859
Landscape Lessons
Analogue came first. Then there was the digital. But before
both there was landscape. Media and landscape go back a long
way. The Cahokia Mounds (Mythographic Station or World
Heritage Site) formed a city of earthwork platforms where
urban development, communication and mythology converge.
Occupied between 800 and 1400, it was the only city north of
the Rio Grande, home to the Mississippian people, and to over
120 mounds. The biggest, Monk’s Mound, is the largest-ever
man-made earthen plaza. With a series of terraces, and at over
30 metres (98 feet) high, it rose above a cityscape with a
population of 20,000. This media platform is where the
arbiters of the Mississippian myths, the high priests, ran it all,
and ran it into the ground. We do not know why this city
collapsed and what happened to its residents, but it is
speculated that it was due to unsustainable development, the
overplanting and mismanagement of corn, rather than war. 1
This was how a media platform from our preliterate past
was supposed to work: a communication node on top of an
earthen pile. The Mississippians’ myth cracked. We imagine it
was a spectacular media collapse, one that walked shoulder to
shoulder with ecological mis-step. Now undeterred and looking
to the long view, the following is a brief on remythologising
our landscape by inserting digital media into that terrain.
Setting the Brief
laser\net 2 explored narrative-building within the space of an
interactive installation, and created a re-mix stage. Sound and
visual images were pulled from an outside ecology: the big
eye, the big mouse, the big boob. These are the props that
seeped inside us.
Re-mix is resistance, representation as resistance,
resistance to someone else’s media spectacle. Re-mix is the
way that media artists take ‘culture’ or the ‘outside ecology’
that is spewed out everywhere by everyone around us, from
university lecturers to those ‘el globo’ businesses: Disney,
Apple, and so on. In a world that is always coming to us
already emptied, stripped, re-mix breaks it up and circulates it
again, and sends it back down the road to become our
mythology. From numbing spectacle to a whispered voice,
creativity is dependent upon, and cannot escape from, the
media environment within which it works. Re-mix is the
ecology, where media environment and natural environment
converge. Re-mix is an aesthetic of reuse, an ecology of images
in its most literal form, a sustainable development of sound
and visual images. It is the brownfield site of visual/aural
culture. We remythologise the landscape by sampling it
(sampling the natural environment is different from sampling
the media environment).
laser\net is a model for a kind of platform, a screen, upon
which jane and joe look at each other. It divided one space
with a two-sided screen. The left side saw the right side on the
screen, and vice versa. As soon as jane understood she was
looking at the projection of a space, she started to wave at the
screen. She saw joe on the screen wave back. ‘I see you seeing
me’ is the paradigm of subjectivity, the architecture of
consciousness and its re-mix slippages. Why look at a
projection of jane when you can see jane? The screen was
deliciously redundant – as redundant as any art. This is the
framework for any narrative. When you re-mix narrative, you
insert yourself into the picture. Narrative becomes a vehicle
for the identity of the speaker and listener. It becomes a
feedback loop, in which the narrator sees and hears him- or
herself. Voice changes: when joe sees jane see him (active),
they quickly become a group seeing itself (reflexive). laser\net
made clear the architecture of reflexivity born in any
narrative environment.
And What the Alchemist Didn’t Have
Will Alsop remarked that the countryside is now completely
plumbed in. In an economy increasingly based on information
transfer, we can live and work anywhere because we can
transfer from anywhere. The ubiquity of services
notwithstanding, there are huge differences between
living/working in the country and the city, the biggest
difference being – simply – the difference between country
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