Andscapes: As the Bug Crawls

Borrowing landscape architect Martin Prominski’s term ‘andscape’, this essay attempts to forge a link between two definitions of andscape: on the one hand, as a non-dualistic approach to environment that productively problematises distinctions of subject-object, nature-culture; and, on the other hand, as emerging from an artistic practice in landscape that is rooted in epistemological questions concerning empirical measurement. My point of departure for thinking about andscapes here is a critical look at the default perspective of distance across landscapes: distance as the crow flies. A literal top-down cartographic perspective – the global point of view of satellites, planes, drones – flattens a landscape’s surface irregularities and renders the distance between two points smooth and two-dimensional. But what might be learned about a landscape if we measure its distance from a more surficial, earthbound perspective – for instance, from a bug’s point of view? If we adopt the practice of measuring as the bug crawls, what temporalities and qualities of the Earth’s surface might surface through this action? And while this practice troubles notions of scalability, what gains can be made in valuing specificity? Moreover, could an artistic read of the physical resistance of roughness evoke a political resistance to smoothness?

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Elizabeth McTernan

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 159-171

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[0001]Berlin, Germany

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.21

SO-VID: f4baf55d-e0c3-4d96-95ff-20711d4985df

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.21

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] S. Ahmed (2004) Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (2). 25–42.

[2] R. Allen (2008) Allen’s dictionary of English phrases. Penguin UK, London.

[3] A. Arèneset al. (August 2018) Giving depth to the surface: An exercise in the Gaia-graphy of critical zones. The Anthropocene Review, 5 (2). 120–135.

[4] M. Bjornerud (2018) Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[5] J. L. Borges (1998) Collected fictions. A. Hurley (Trans.). New York: Penguin Books.

[6] L. Burckhardt (2015) Why is landscape beautiful? The science of strollology. Basel: Birkhäuser.

[7] M. Castells (2009) The rise of networked society, The information age: Economy, society and culture vol. I [1996]. Oxford: Blackwell.

[8] M. Dorrian & F. Pousin (Eds.) (2013) Seeing from above: The aerial view in visual culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

[9] U. Eco (1994) On the impossibility of drawing a map of the empire on a scale of 1 to 1. In: How to travel with a salmon: and other essays. W. Weaver (Trans.). New York: Harcourt. 95–106.

[10] D. J. Haraway (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[11] Iowa Agriculture Literacy Foundation (2019) How far apart are crop rows? Blog post, 27 November. Available from: http://iowaagliteracy.wordpress.com/2019/11/27/how-far-apart-are-crop-rows/ (Accessed 3 August 2020).

[12] R. A. Nelson (1981) Foundations of the international system of units (SI). The Physics Teacher, 19 (9). 598.

[13] F. Lambotte and D. Meunier (2013) From bricolage to thickness: Making the most of the messiness of research narratives. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 8 (1). 85–100.

[14] V. Larjosto (2019) Dynamic urban islands: Seasonal landscape strategies for resilient transformation [Dissertation]. Hannover: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität.

[15] B. Latour (2016) Is geo-logy the new umbrella for all the sciences? Hints for a neo-Humboldtian university. Lecture at Cornell University, 25 October, Ithaca, New York.

[16] J.E. Lovelock and L. Margulis (1974) Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: The Gaia hypothesis. Tellus. Series A. Stockholm: International Meteorological Institute, 26 (1–2). 2–10.

[17] J. McPhee (1998) Annals of the former world. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[18] M. Prominski (2014) Andscapes: Concepts of nature and culture for landscape architecture in the Anthropocene. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 9 (1). 6–19.

[19] H. Reinert (2016) About a stone. Environmental Humanities, 8 (1), citing K. Yusoff (2013) Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31. 779–795.

[20] N. Shepard (2019) The living mountain[1977]. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

[21] The 17th General Conference on Weights and Measures (1983) Resolution 1. Available from: http://www.bipm.org/en/CGPM/db/17/1/ (Accessed 26 July 2020).

[22] A. L. Tsing (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[23] A. Wulf (2015) The invention of nature: The adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science. London: John Murray.

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