35 years after Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970 the world population has doubled to 7 billion people. The combined effect of population growth and industrial processes on our planet is now so great that it has been proposed that our age should be regarded as a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene. Changes to the atmosphere and the effects of mining, manufacturing and agriculture are affecting Earth systems and increasing rates of extinction to levels that will be as visible in geological strata as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) boundary that marks the end of the age of the dinosaurs. Even if the putative need for continual economic growth can be sustained by renewable energy sources and/or the long-awaited realisation of thermonuclear electricity generation, the journey to a world population of 16 billion by the end of this Century will cause us to question attempts to preserve even small areas of nature in an unaltered state. New forms of art are required to help us to think about what is natural, essential, desirable or beautiful.
http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/6330729-anthropocene-desiderata
Landscape art used to be the genre through which nature was contemplated, but it is now so unfashionable it no longer appears in the index of most books about contemporary art. The painting of views of nature emerged from the domination of history painting in the 16th Century to become the most fashionable form of painting in the 19th Century. From being a background setting for biblical scenes, nature became the subject of pictures. A landscape picture is a kind of virtual garden combining elements such as trees, rivers and hills into a pictorial whole. In everyday life relatively peripheral elements such as these can be ‘bracketed’ by our consciousness so as not to distract us from our constructed sensation of living in a plastic ‘now’.
Our sense of the present is constantly modified by events flowing
with time. The attraction of pictures is that they offer a frozen ‘now’ in
which associations, emotions and memories can be experienced in relation to a
scene which is comprehensible but outside time. With contemplation and reverie
the viewer of a picture can vicariously experience a place in which the passage
of time is halted. Through the materiality of a landscape picture we can
imagine our life in relation to nature depicted as being almost a substance.
 |
Wooded Landscape with Figures
Walking by a
Sandy Bank
by Jan Wijnants.
Manchester City Art Galleries |
Idealised nature can be contained within a picture, as a paradise
garden or a hortus conclusus contained real plants. What we mean by the
word ‘nature’ has become something of a lost question. The word 'nature' was
originally derived from the Latin word nasci (to be born). This original
definition suggests that the natural world is filled with life that is tended
and cared for. The concept of the walled garden implies that nature is only
fully realised through the act of cultivation.The creation of art is like
cultivation. It was through 17th Century Dutch painting that landscape art
found an expression that was both popular and commercially viable for artists.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/wooded-landscape-
with-figures-walking-by-a-sandy-bank-206397
with-figures-walking-by-a-sandy-bank-206397
Although the wealth of the Dutch merchants who bought landscape
paintings was derived from international trade, the culture of that country has
been shaped by the need to ‘reclaim’ their land from water. What would
otherwise be a nation of marshes became an agriculturally productive land due to a
concerted effort to exclude water. This opposition between cultivated nature
and ‘other’ is like opposition between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The opposite of
cultivation is often though to be wilderness or even void. Language has
associated ‘nature’ with forms we believe to be beautiful or purposeful aspects
of the naturally occurring world. It could be argued that its definition has
evolved as much through landscape art as language.
Landscape art embraced fashions ranging from the beguiling
quaintness of the ‘picturesque’ to an appreciation of the menace and looming
magnitude essential to the ‘sublime’ but landscape art does not easily show the
invisible workings of nature. William Dyce’s painting Pegwell Bay , Kent October
5th 1858 (1858-1860)
was made
when the divergence of art and science was accelerating. The coastal scene
depicts a family group on the seashore, collecting shells and fossils while
Donati's Comet is visible in the sky. It was painted as Charles Darwin’s book
‘On the Origin of Species’ become famous. Dyce’s painting hints at the cultural
change that occurred when natural philosophy evolved into science, but can only
suggest a sense of unease caused by the emerging scientific view of nature and
the resulting controversies that continue to this day.
In the 20th Century, landscape pictures slowly disappeared from
modern art at the
 |
| CAMM. F.J. Marvels of Modern Science. London: George Newnes Ltd.1935 |
Although landscape art remains popular, especially with those who
paint for recreation, the context in which nature is understood has changed.
Technology extended a comfortable insulation from nature, which was once the
preserve of the privileged and wealthy, to the wider population of consumers
who live in the ‘developed world’. While the rest of the world now expects to
attain the same levels of health and comfort, technology has produced
unexpected effects. Environmental damage is often invisible, such as: the
threat to birds from dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), the damage to the
ozone layer caused by chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs) and the exaggerated
retention of heat in the atmosphere due to release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from
fossil fuels.
Within one
generation the widespread definition of ‘untamed’ nature has gone from the
‘other’ that should be feared, to the concept of ‘Gaia’ that needs to be
respected and protected. Once the return of an ice age was feared and now we
are worried about uncontrolled global warming. Communities in harsh
environments face difficulties made worse by climate change.
Can traditional landscape art ever be more than a nostalgic icon
of nature in the 21st Century? Will it only offer a superficial view of nature?
Even mass media and journalism struggle, through individual stories, to portray
our changed relationship to nature as much as art fails to contain it within an
isolating frame. From the single viewpoint of landscape art the global scale of
the human-induced changes escapes understanding. Whereas the traditional
landscape picture often depicted a scene resulting from the efforts of humans
to establish cultivation within wilderness, today it might depict a wilderness
that is being preserved.
Even before the current ecological crisis became evident with the
publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) (1)
the extension of our senses by technical means such as infra-red photography,
radar and
the mapping of large-scale phenomena with isoline maps caused an
increasing disparity between the practices of art and new visions of nature.
The ability to see nature via technology has produced little change in the
cadence of art. The investigation of nature by science produces images that can
be like echoes returned from darkness.
 |
| Page 171 Plate 187 Structure of a Typhoon. Radar Photograph: Official Photograph U.S. Navy. The New Landscape in Art and Science |
.
Gyorgy Kepes’ book The New Landscape in Art and Science
(1956) (2) contains
 |
| Page 167 Plate 179 The New Landscape in Art and Science |
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| Page 262 Plate 321 Reinforced Concrete Structure :The New Landscape in Art and Science |
Gyorgy Kepes used
the word ‘landscape’ as a metaphor for an emerging designed world which might
be realised through the application of science. The implicit message behind the
examples of modern architecture was that new technology should create buildings
free from the restrictions of classicism and express almost biological
principles of construction. The design for the Sydney Opera house was decided
in the year following publication. The tone of this book is optimistic, in the
style of Buckminster Fuller. By stating that mathematics describes the
processes that create both natural and engineered structures, a fusion of the
two seems possible.
Using science to build the future was a theme of the 1950s, both
in the the capitalist West and the communist East As a statement of cultural
difference, Europe and the United States New York
Modernism was a form of investigation, comparable to the work of
scientists who were defining nature in terms of four fundamental forces;
gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.
Greenberg’s assessment of art sought to define painting as the exploration of
the properties height, width, brightness and colour. Perhaps it is a
coincidence that some of Jackson Pollock’s paintings resemble images of
sub-atomic particles photographed in bubble-chambers operated at that time.
 |
An example of the type of interaction being studied by Experiment 234 in the Fermilab 15-Foot Bubble Chamber
|
Gyorgy Kepes was within the canon of writers and philosophers
identified by Susan Sontag in her essay One Culture and the New
Sensibility (1965) (3) Susan Sontag predicted that
emerging technologies would lead to new creative possibilities operating in an
area between science and art. Within a few generations the transformative power
of technology had eclipsed the traditional circumstances of landscape art. Wealth
came from underground, in the form of oil, instead of agriculture. The
landscape was increasingly seen from above. The view from the Eiffel Tower
With some naivety Susan Sontag’s essay praises “the clean
automated technology” that she claimed would help to end the intellectual
antagonism between 19th Century “smoky” industrial processes and “literary men”
such as Emerson, Thoreau and Ruskin. Her theory led her to predict a new
non-literary culture created by “certain painters, sculptors, architects,
social planners, film makers, TV technicians, neurologists, musicians,
electronics engineers, dancers, philosophers, and sociologists.”
Landscape art was not one of Susan Sontag’s interests. In her
opinion nature became “a vessel of spiritual and aesthetic values” only in
opposition to the dehumanising industrialisation of the 19th Century. Her essay
anticipated that new cultural forms would emerge from what she saw as an ending to the artificial 200 year separation between science and art. Vehemently rejecting
C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thesis,(4) she argued that there is a false
division between the concepts of “unintelligible, morally neutral science and
technology” and the “morally committed, human-scale art”. Claiming that art -
“is never simply (or even mainly) a vehicle of ideas or of moral sentiments. It
is, first of all, an object modifying our consciousness and sensibility,
changing the composition, however slightly, of the humus that nourishes all
specific ideas and sentiments” - Susan Sontag argued that the essential
functions of art and science overlap. She expected that avant-garde culture
would increasingly occupy a new middle ground.
The experiment was called SEEK and consisted of a
computer controlled miniature gantry crane which was programmed to
find and stack a collection of small wooden blocks in an open-topped 5 by 8
foot tray with transparent sides. To simulate computer/human interactions the
tray was populated by gerbils that constantly disrupted the arrangements of the
blocks. The project was exhibited the Software exhibition (1970),
curated by Jack Burnham for the Jewish Museum in New York
By describing the project as an experiment in which the computer programme was the
test subject,
and not the gerbils, the development team was able to get funding from the Ford
foundation and Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA- inventors of the
internet). As well as fulfilling Susan Sontag’s prediction of a new combined
art and science field, SAM, Senster and SEEK presented a new aspect of the technological sublime. Whereas technology
challenged the physical power of nature before the 1950s, after, information
technology appeared to have the ability to imitate its capacity for behaviour.
Renaissance painters had already used amorphous clouds as a
pictorial device to enable Earthbound people and celestial divine events to be
depicted within the same frame.(10) By the time John Constable was
producing his cloud studies science was dispelling their formlessness by
classifying them into types. The appreciation of form became more eclectic in the 20th Century. The elegant tracery of trees and the sculptured form of mountains was joined by a mapping of the apple-shaped form of the Earth’s magnetic field and photographs of the curtains of light created by auroras. The ‘floating castle’ architecture of battleships gave way to the sleek shapes of airships and submarines. The First World War trenches were attacked with clouds of poison gas, softer than rain but as deadly as shrapnel. Aeroplanes, cars and trains became progressively more streamlined. Motorway created the need for clover-leaf junctions.
Both Land Art and these homologous structures could be considered
as ‘heterotopias’ – a term coined by Michael Foucault to describe sites that
only achieve significance in relation to places or processes far away. Foucault’s theory of heterotopias describes different categories of such
spaces. The military installations could belong to his category of
‘heterotopias of crisis or deviation’ because of their implied threat from a
distance. Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field also implicitly
refers to the danger of a lightning strike. Another category of Foucault’s heterotopias
links distant places. The Field Of Mars in ancient Rome Cinder Lake Arizona
In the following years a few interesting but now largely forgotten
creations fulfilled that speculation. As predicted by Susan Sontag, it was a
designer who suggested to the artist Edward Ihnatowicz that he should build the
first environment-sensitive sculpture Sound Activated Mobile (SAM ). The piece was exhibited at the Cybernetic Serendipity
exhibition in 1968. SAM comprised
an array of four microphones attached to the front of sound-reflecting dishes,
combined into a flower-like structure, on top of an electro-hydraulically
operated ‘spine’ which moved the structure to face the source of
sounds. By 1971 this project had Senster. With
the help of engineers from the Mullard and the Philips electronics companies,
Edward Ihnatowicz created a kind of early electronicl robot. Unlike the
mechanical automata created as toys since Hellenistic times, the Senster was
capable of self-determined movements enabled by a computer programme. Senster
responded to sounds and movement made by gallery visitors. The system
detected sound with microphones and movement with short-range radar built into
its ‘head’.
developed into a computer-controlled
mechanical giraffe-like moving sculpture called the
 |
| Senster |
Although its legs
were firmly anchored to the stage on which it was presented, the elongated neck
and head moved around a volume of 30 cubic metres. After a two years of development
the device was installed at the Evoluon, the permanent science and technology
exhibition run by Philips in Eindhoven
It seems appropriate to refer to Senster as a device
as much as a motorised sculpture. The project was located very much in the
centre of the ‘new sensibility’ field predicted by Susan Sontag. The project
featured both in the book Science and Technology in Art Today (1972)
(5) and the BBC book Tomorrow's World -second Volume (1971) (6) based on the popular science
and technology TV programme of the same name. The installation of Senster at
Evoluon followed an established tradition of celebrating technology in special
exhibitions. From the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations
(1851) in London New York Crystal Palace
Exhibitions such as these relocated the idea of limitless power
from nature to technology. In his book American Technological Sublime (1994)
(7) Richard E. Nye described the rise of technology as a rival not
only to the actual power of nature but also its capacity
to create sensations of grandeur and awe within the witnessing
individual and society.
This feeling was already entering culture when J.M.W. Turner
produced his painting Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway
(1844). The viewer is invited to empathise as much with the tiny image
of a rabbit fleeing from the approaching steam locomotive as with the ingenuity
of the railway. The technological sublime became established in public awareness
during a 25 year period between the detonation of the first atomic bomb on the
16th July 1945
and the launch of Apollo 11 on the 16th July 1969 . Seven years after the end of the Second
World War H-bombs 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima Nagasaki
Within nine years
of the detonation of the first nuclear bomb, nuclear power reactors were being
built. If we doubt that the quality of overpowering strength, attributed to
nature by Edmund Burke in 1756 (8) , now resides with technology we only have to
consider that after the devastation of parts of Japan
Susan Sontag’s eclectic list of people she imagined would create
the new fusion of science and art could be characterised as a benign patriarchal intellectuals. Writing just before the escalation of the Vietnam War her
essay presents a reassuring vision of a liberal technocracy that would not just
build a better mousetrap but also design new systems for living. Outside of the
rarefied atmosphere of happenings and installation art, it was architecture
through which modernism was most widely felt. Brutalist architecture was an
international style of building that displays an interest in geometry that can
be traced back to ideas of Platonic shapes studied in ancient Greece
Although many new housing projects were born out of the genuine
desire to create high quality housing, the radical style of this architecture
was eventualy perceived to be alienating and associated with unapproachable
public authorities. To explore the potential of Computer-Aided Urban Design to
improve the work of architects, Nicholas Negroponte with the Machine
Architecture Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) built a
device that was to examine the ability of computers to interact with the
unpredictability of behaviour.
The experiment was called SEEK and consisted of a
 |
| SEEK |
By describing the project as an experiment in which the computer programme was the
 |
| SEEK |
The SAM, Senster and SEEK creations
re-imagined our relationship to nature. Although traditional landscape art made
an emotional connection to nature, depicting it almost as a material substance
in which we are immersed, it failed to account for its invisible underlying
forces. Throughout the 20th Century technological innovations, both destructive
and productive, challenged culture to acknowledge the aspects of nature
revealed by science but ignored by art. Even today it is quite common for
poetic writing or visual art to refer (often without irony) to the mythical
elements of earth, water, air and fire.. It is as if, from the viewpoint of
artists, Ancient Greek philosophy is still current.
20th Century science fiction tended to infiltrate new knowledge of
nature into culture. Probably because of the association between science
fiction and 1930s ‘pulp’ magazines and staggeringly inept 1950s ‘B-picture’
films, this genre of writing is not included in the canon of literature.
Outside the science fiction ghetto, literature does not usually produce
narratives arising from an imagined alteration to the material functioning of
nature. One of the most outstanding exceptions to the inadequacies of science
fiction was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey filmed from
1965 to 1968.
Written in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, the film seems to
be influenced by the philosophical ideas of the Russian rocket scientist and
pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935).. Stanley Kubrick had the audacity to create a
kind of new ‘Greek myth’ in which the narrative spans millions of years to
depict humans transcending earthly constraints. The new space-based destiny
revealed in the final scene is reminiscent of the panpsychism contemplated by
Tsiolkovsky and his followers. (9) The penultimate ‘star gate’
scene uses slit-scan filming to depict a transition to a new state of
existence. As this utopian idea has no physical actuality that can be
photographed, the slit-scan filming was used to create an abstracted visual
equivalence to an imaginary formless state beyond previously experienced
nature.
Kubrick's eagerness to experiment with the fundamental qualities of film echoes the
playful innovations with signal manipulation created by George Martin and the
Beatles during the recording of their album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band (1967). While the dematerialisation of nature was a
feature of impressionist and cubist painting, it was a feature of the 1960s that
a film director and a record producer could contemplate the manipulation of
film and tape-recordings, media usually regarded as owing allegiance to
‘concrete reality’.
 |
| Masolino, The Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore. Capodimonte Museum, Naples. |
Landscaped gardens that had become progressively softer since the
geometry of the 17th Century formal geometrical designs were superseded by the
English landscape park in the 18th Century. The expansive rolling landscapes
loved by aristocrats had their equivalence in the 20th Century. As wealth
creation moved from agriculture to industrial manufacturing the expanded
middle classes took to the golf course.
By the mid-1960s there was a move by some artists in the USA U.S.
 |
| Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) |
Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty (1970) was made by placing 6,650 tons of rock
in the Great
Salt Lake, Utah
Land Art creations often share visual similarities with scientific
or military installations. The Lightning Field resembles a
phased-array radio telescope, the type used to discover pulsars. One of Robert Smithson’s early pieces was PartiallyBuried Shed
(1972) made at Kent State University,Ohio
1945. Conversely, military or scientific projects sometimes have the appearance of land art. Concrete sound-mirrors built to
detect aircraft in the pre-radar era of the 1920’s could be mistaken for land
art projects if presented out of context. Radio aerials constructed from
concentric cylinders of wire mesh for communication with submarines also
resemble a kind of Land Art creation.
 |
Left: Preparations for recording the detonation
of the first 'atomic' bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, United States. Right: Partially Buried Shed at Kent Sate University |
 |
| A Wullenweber Circularly Disposed Antenna Array (CDAA) |
Another category
of heterotopias identified by Foucault signifies different times. Most
Land Art sites allude to entropy and the passage of time. Spiral Jetty was
submerged by rising water levels for several years only to emerge covered in
crystals. A condition of visiting Lightning Field is that viewers
are required to live next to the work for 24 hours in a log cabin next to the
installation. Whereas traditional landscape pictures offer an image of nature
frozen in time, Land Art places the viewer within the landscape and are so
large that time must be spent traversing them.
Another non-art heterotopia that suggests distance and time is the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault which contains a stock of frozen seeds. Located on the arctic island of Spitsbergen
 |
| The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault |
Whereas the Svalbard facility contains the dormant genes of future plants from around
the planet, the Eden Project in Cornwall UK
A more radical precursor to the Eden
Biosphere 2 has
since been modified for use as a research centre in which scientist come and
go on a daily basis. (11) Because the biomes can be isolated from
the outside atmosphere the centre is used for Earth systems research, such as
investigating the effect of climate change on specific species of plants.
Facilities such as these may be used in the future to test the feasibility of genetically
engineering plants to increase their photosynthetic process by 25%, with a
corresponding increase in CO2 uptake from the atmosphere. Initially food crops
might be altered but there are proposals to re-engineer what remains of
‘nature’ so as to deal with the results of climate change.(12)
Attempting to create a ‘nature 2.0’ (13)
would be as controversial as other geo-engineering plans such as altering the
albedo of the atmosphere with aerosol particles or sequestering CO2
underground. If such projects were realised we (or someone )would have our hand on the world
thermostat as we could release the gas or switch off the aerosol pumping if an
ice-age threatened. Even without such drastic measures, humanity is already
flying the planet without a chart to guide us. The failure of the original
Biosphere 2 project suggests that re-engineering what is left of the natural
world would be an impossibly ambitious and dangerous process. However,
evolutionary computation has the potential to create algorithms that are
useable, but so complex as to be beyond human understanding. In the future this
power might be used to try to re-order the biosphere to function in a stable way
within the conditions created by humans.
This scale of geo-engineering would be the antithesis of the sustainability movement
that seeks to modify economic activity to fit in with natural systems. The
‘hard engineering’ that tried to stop river flooding with concrete levees and
stop coastal erosion with sea-walls can be replaced with natural water
interception and salt marshes. Renewable energy systems; photovoltaic
electricity, wind-power and tidal generators are an alternative to fossil
fuels.
The idea that human influence over Earth systems is now so great
that we are living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is gaining
acceptance. Some geologists are sceptical, they depend on their system of
classification of eras and epochs as physicists need their periodic table. As
there are artificial elements in the periodic table we also live in an epoch of
altered Earth systems. Even if computers are not used to re-engineer eco-systems
they can be used to help us imagine the Anthropocene. The narrated computer
animation Welcome to the Anthropocene (2012) (14)
by Owen Gaffney and Félix Pharand-Deschênes used climate data and composite
satellite images rendered onto a virtual globe. Such data visualisations are
digital heterotopias, the most auspicious realisation of Susan Sontag’s ‘new
sensibility’ prediction.
Science can
provide facts about the Anthropocene but we need new art to help us contemplate
its meaning. Data visualisations are important but they will not replace art.
We need a new equivalent to landscape art that will help us to consider the
distinction between nature and artifice. In the Anthropocene the ‘walled
garden’ is now greater than the wilderness that used to surround it. The ‘lost
question’ of what is natural needs to be re-discovered. Whether we are inside nature looking out or on the outside looking in, the images of this future art
will be the Anthropocene desiderata.
The Arizona Connection.
 |
Due to an optical illusion Giovanni Schiaparelli
misidentified marks on the surface of Mars as connected
lines in 1877. Compounding this error, his Italian word
‘caneli’ was translated into English as ‘canals’ instead of
the less evocative word 'channel'.As well as observing Mars
in great detail from the Flagstaff Observatory, his other achievement was the discovery of asteroid 793 |
Arizona, as well as being the
American state in which, Roden Crater,
Biosphere 2, the former NASA training site at Cinder Lake and the setting for
the stereoscopic anaglyph film It Came from Outer Space (1953) can be found, is also home to the Flagstaff
Observatory. After establishing the observatory
in 1894 Percival Lowell
Percival Lowell was a businessman and scientist born in 1855. His generation grew up with the expectation that the power of engineering would only ever increase. The invention of large-scale steel production enabled continent-wide railway networks to be built. Percival Lowell’s books mark the period in which global-scale engineering was first imagined. The possibility of producing planet-wide engineering projects occurred to
 |
| Cross-section at Richmond, V.A. Three lines cross Chesapeake and Ohio, Seaboard Air-line and the Southern Railroad |
Science fiction, radio, film and architecture
celebrated technology through stories and the essence of their form. Radio,
film and modern architecture owe their existence to the application of science.
Wall plaques depicting the trades that made the Empire State Building Empire State
 |
| The Empire State Building, Lobby. |
Percival Lowell imagined that Mars was experiencing a process of environmental decline that was natural, but today’s speculation about geo-engineering the Earth is a response to the challenge of climate change. Means of changing the amount of sunlight reaching Earth, aerosol particles created and pumped into the upper atmosphere, space mirrors, are unlikely to be attempted. The more straightforward concepts of sequestering carbon dioxide underground after capturing it from power plant flue gasses or even extracting the gas from the atmosphere seem less extreme by comparison. All of these schemes would involve the use of extra energy that would contribute to global warming if derived from fossil fuels. The only energy sources free from CO2 emissions are the renewable ones; wind, tide and solar and the ‘atomic’ options of nuclear fission and the as yet unachieved thermonuclear fusion. After 60 years of nuclear fission power the I.T.E.R. experimental fusion reactor in
The idea of reconstructing ecosystems damaged by climate change could be extended to change the whole of the biosphere. Human influence already affects the evolution of species without our intention. It is no longer just a question of reducing biodiversity; the species that survive in the Anthropocene will be genetically changed by the environment we have created. In the age of the technological sublime we already behave as if our industrial and agricultural industries were a given process as inevitable as nature. Laurens van der Post once suggested that the continued existence of wilderness is necessary for the psychological well-being of humanity. If the Anthropocene removes the psychological expansion chamber into which we once escaped the pressure of our techno-civilisation, art will have to work harder. .
 |
Gyorgi Kepes - The distinction between images of purely artificial systems such as the left image of oscillations within electronic circuits, made visible by an oscilloscope and the centre photograph of destructive shock-wave in a sheet of glass ( A natural process within an artificial substance.) The right image shows an x-ray diffraction photograph of DNA - an artificial abstracted image of a natural molecule. The X shape is caused by x-rays diffracted by the helical shape of DNA, recorded on a photographic emulsion.The New Landscape in Art and Science. 1956.
|
(1) London: Penguin in association with Hamish Hamilton,
(2) Chicago : Paul Theobald
(3) SONTAG, S. Against Interpretation. New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, Chapter 5: Section 5.
(4) SNOW, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: 1961: New York: Cambridge University Press.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf
(5) BENTHAM, J. London: Thames and Hudson. Pages 78-83.
(6) BAXTER,R. and BURKE, J. London: B.B.C. Page 201.
(7) Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press
(8) Burke, Edmund. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful,
(9) TSIOLKOVSKY, K. The Will of the Universe. The Unknown Intelligence, 1928
(10) DAMISH, H. A Theory of/cloud/:Toward a History of Painting. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2002, Plates 2-5.
(11) New Scientist 27th July 2013 Pages 41- 45
(12) New Scientist: 5th July 2008: Pages 32- 35
(13) Welcome to the Anthropocene.
http://www.igbp.net/5.1081640c135c7c04eb480001217.html
(14) http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433069087785;view=1up;seq=13
(4) SNOW, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: 1961: New York: Cambridge University Press.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf
(5) BENTHAM, J. London: Thames and Hudson. Pages 78-83.
(6) BAXTER,R. and BURKE, J. London: B.B.C. Page 201.
(7) Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press
(8) Burke, Edmund. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful,
(9) TSIOLKOVSKY, K. The Will of the Universe. The Unknown Intelligence, 1928
(10) DAMISH, H. A Theory of/cloud/:Toward a History of Painting. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2002, Plates 2-5.
(11) New Scientist 27th July 2013 Pages 41- 45
(12) New Scientist: 5th July 2008: Pages 32- 35
(13) Welcome to the Anthropocene.
http://www.igbp.net/5.1081640c135c7c04eb480001217.html
(14) http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433069087785;view=1up;seq=13
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