The Art and Geography and Geography and Art of Landscape View Digital Media

Colloquium
Michael Kilburn,  Michael Miller,  Cynthia Roberts  

These studies explore aesthetic and geohumanistic aspects of landscape. Michael Kilburn’s paper “Anthroposcenes: the art and geography of cultural landscapes” discusses landscape as a bridge between physical and human geography. Given the standard definition of landscape as “a portion of the earth’s surface, comprising all that can be viewed at one time from one place,” the subjective element (viewed by whom?) is always already inherent to the concept, raising questions about perspective, framing, representation, both aesthetic and ideological Photographer and philosopher E. Michael Miller discusses Christian Norberg-Schulz’s phenomenology of place in “Genius Loci and photographic seeing,” illustrated by his own imaginary landscapes. And independent artist and theoretician Cynthia Roberts’ paper “Lines of Demarcation: Meta to Micro iterations of knowledge” explores demarcations of individual and collective experience through the scale and perspective of mapping personal and political psychogeographies. Citing case studies of contemporary artwork, including the author’s own body of work created in Le Havre as well as other contemporary American artists. Collections of individual narratives become strata within the folds of history, offering complexity and conflict an opportunity to exist in the seemingly neutral abstract environment of a map. Together, papers address the conference theme of reinserting the human perspective a landscape increasingly colonized by scientific and economistic tehne.