Landscape phenomenology

Wylie, J., (2007), Landscape, Oxon, Routledge.

page 139.
Landscape phenomenology often lays stress upon some measure of direct, bodily contact with, and experience of landscape.

page 141
land art/ earth art, - movement began late 1960s, - aim to liberate art from confined, controlled settings e.g. galleries / museums. (spiral jetty).

page 143
landscape is conceptualised in terms of active, embodied and dynamic relations betweem people and land, between culture and nature more generally.
these relations are seen as ongoing and evolving rather than static. forever changing

page 144
landscape becomes the accomplice and expression. ?

p145
we define ourselves - we define the essence of what it is to exist as a human being - in terms of visual detachment. we define ourselves not as creatures in a world but as points of view upon it.

p146
thinking is thus the essence of being human, or, as Descarts puts it, I think therefore I am.

p149
"far from my body being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body" (ibid102).

p150
As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject: I do not possess it in thought, or spread out toward it some idea of blue.....I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it thinks itself in me. (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p214 Merleau - Ponty, 1969 quoted in Wylie, 2007, p150)) It's only when someone puts it into words.

p152
When I look, I see with landscape

p160
Landscape here understood , is not an amount of something, but a quality of feeling, in the end an emotional investment. I aggree.

p161
'through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are part of it' (ibid. p.191).

At its most intense, the boundaries between person and place, or between the self and the landscape, dissolve altogether. (ingold, 2000,p.56, original emphisis).

p.162
the landscape is not so much the object as 'the homeland of our thoughts'. (ingold, 2000,
I like this.
p176
Landscape is more than a way of seeing. Landscape is that with which we see, a perception - with - the - world. When I look I see with landscape.

p178
'my power of imagining is nothing but the persistence of the world around me'. Yes I only think about what I see and hear.

p182
Phenomonology originally takes shape as a lost quest for lost essences and ultimate foundations. ? Is this true?

History of maps

What is a map ? - A map is a graphic representation or scale model of spatial concepts. It is a means for conveying geographic information. Incorporated in a map is the understanding that it is a "snapshot" of an idea.

A map can display only a few selected features, which are portrayed usually in highly symbolic styles according to some kind of classification scheme. In these ways, all maps are estimations, generalizations, and interpretations of true geographic conditions. Maps of all kinds are fundamentally important for modern society.

Modern maps:- much of the world was poorly known until the widespread use of aerial photography following World War I. Modern cartography is based on a combination of ground observations and remote sensing.

J.S. Aber (2008) Brief History of Maps and Cartography. [Online] Available at: http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm. [Accessed on 18-3-2011]

Maps byArtists

Maps are an increasingly common feature of artistic practice in this information addicted early 21st century, as both representations of real places and diagrams of intangible things, whether movement, data, networks or imaginary realms. Any of these works represent maps that exist in people’s mind.

The exception is Simon Clarke’s Geographically Accurate Tube Map, which shows the actual shape of the underground system

Icon Magazine. (Issue 040 October 2006).Maps by Artists. Online [Available at] http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2906 [Accessed on 18/3/2011]

"Glory in human chaos": Stephen Walter's maps of London go on show at Fenton House

By Culture24 Reporter | 12 October 2011

© Stephen Walter

Exhibition: Stephen Walter – The Island: London Series, Fenton House, London, until October 30 2011

"My maps revel in the intricacy of life," says Stephen Walter. "My epithets to places are intrinsically tied into the stories and experiences of the people who inhabit them and their collective knowledge.

"Life is fascinating. People are fascinating. How this mixes with the geography of this world is even more interesting and endless.

"The maps glory in the human chaos and are a celebration of the concept of place. And the sheer intricacy of it all."

In Walter's world, every one of his minutely detailed drawings of London (The Island, as he sees it) tells a story.

Culture 24, Avilable at: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting+%26+drawing/art366017 [Accessed on 18th 0ct 2011 at 11.45]

Psychogeography

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."^[1] Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."^[2]

1. ^ Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955
2. ^ http://www.utne.com/pub/2004_124/promo/11262-1.html Joseph Hart, "A New Way of Walking," Utne Reader July/August 2004

Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography [Accessed on 18th October 2011 at 11.15].

Urbanomic/Robin MacKay

Urbanomic/Robin MacKay: The Concept of Non-Photography
Philosopher and Director of Urbanomic Robin MacKay, gives a talk and reading from Francois Laruelle's book The Concept of Non-Photography, which develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, as well as introducing the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle's 'non-philosophy'.

Arnolfini, (2011) Available at: http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/events/details/1005a [Accessed on 18th October 2011 AT 10.45]

Over the last few decades, conceptual and post-conceptual art has tended to colonise the space of philosophy, whilst philosophy has retreated into academic isolation, and the sciences have continued to become more specialized and inaccessible. Urbanomic proposes a renegotiation of the relationship between philosophy science and art, on the model of an interrupted relay in which thinkers offer their conceptual resources for reflection on artists' practice, and artists in turn develop and synthesise them in unforeseen ways, stimulating a productive and unpredictable cycle of "research and development" subordinated neither to the norms of academic thinking nor to the mainstream discourses of art criticism.

http://www.urbanomic.com/about.php

situationist art movement

They originated in a small band of avante-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner of the group who founded the magazine 'Situationiste Internationale' in 1957. At first, they were principally concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life.

At first, the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure.

Key dates 1957 - 1972

Available at: http://www.artmovements.co.uk/situationism.htm [Accessed on 17th October 2011 at 20.00].

What is a flâneur?

What is a flâneur?
(The familiar Englishnd academic) a definition of the flâneur is courtesy of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin's writings, and is a far cry from the traditional French translation of flâneur an idler or lounger. For Benjamin (Paris - Capital of the nineteenth century New Left Review 1968), the flâneur was the stroller and observer hidden in the crowd. His haunt was the developing consumerism that swept Paris in the nineteenth century. The arcades as described in Benjamin's The Arcades Project provided a protected urban space from which the flâneur could consume his surroundings.

Today, I believe that the street is the flâneur's drawing room, the cafe his study. The flâneur is a native of the cityscape. He can use the city as an open book; reading the street and the activities it contained. Hopefully you too can find the time to take part in a bit of flâneurie.

For more background see Keith Tester's book The Flaneur published in 1994 and Edmund White's The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris published in 2001 (commission from the sale of any books via this website help support the Buckingham Old Gaol).

Available at: http://www.flaneur.co.uk/frabout.html [Accessed on 17th October 2011 at 18.20]

Kitchen Stories. 2003. Hamers,B. Sweden. Bul Bul Films. [DVD].



pic ref: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323872/

Very funny. Its interesting to see the freindship develope between the two men who meet for the purposes of a resurch project and the jelousy it cause his old friend.