There is no away

Recently I've been delving into the the difficult terrain of the perspective view in landscape architecture. It is the start of a study into the failure of the single point perspective and what some critics call 'hyper-realism'.

The human gaze, the view of the surveyor has serious limitations in expressing the true nature of experience. Some critics have suggested a reintroduction of abstraction, proposing a kind of 'loose-realism' that may encapsulate the real, immersive, non linear and non local experience of a landscape.1

Furthermore there is a laziness to hyper-realism that cheapens the experience of landscape, that strips it of its sincerity. Being so easily digestible sends the viewer into a benign, unreflective state. These images dull our emotions and smother them with an effortless and easily identifiable kitsch.2 Being more real than real, more pristine than possible gives a sour, disingenuous nature to these images.

There is a dizziness to experience; spinning and disorientating when recalling memories of a place. These memories have no orientation, they are smashed together with emotions, sensations and events seemingly unrelated to the immediate experience.

This has then led into thinking how massively non-local, viscous phenomena may permeate through these images. How does one layer global-warming, the human hyper-object, dendrites into our immediate experience and expression?

Delving down into the depths of the non-human how do we obliterate the individual from these images? Once you remove us the priviledged position of viewer, of unemotional observer, how does one reimmerse themselves back into this viscious interconnected environment we find ourselves in?

On non-locality:

'These discoveries all share something insofar as they humiliate the human, decisively decentering us from a place of pampered priveledge in the scheme of things. Non-locality is prehaps the most drastic of all these, since it implies that the notion of being located at all is only ephiphenomenal to a deeper, atemporal, implicate order' 3

Fuck.
Well that makes hyper-realism useless then.
Doesn't it?

The privilaged, one point human perspective suggesting an objective, removed, controlled and informative view of a singular locality.
A view that is so real it is fake.
If we adhere to this thinking, that now we have to accept that 'locality is always a false immediacy'.4 We therefore need a new graphic language that can live up to this challenge. A graphic language that is thick, dripping with murkey experience. A loose-realism devoid of kitsch. A language that is viscous, that penetrates, that sticks to us like a fly melting into a jar of honey.

1 - Karl Kullmann (2014) Hyper-realism and loose-reality: the limitations of digital realism and alternative principles in landscape design visualization, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 9:3, 20-3

2. -   Katie Kingery-Page & Howard Hahn (2012) The aesthetics of digital representation: realism, abstraction and kitsch, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 7:2, 68-75

3- Timothy Morton (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.pg 39

4- Timothy Morton (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.pg 40