Wattenmeer
The Wattenmeer (in German and the Wadden Sea in English) is an intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea. It lies between the coast of northwestern continental Europe and the range of low-lying Frisian Islands, forming a shallow body of water with tidal flats and wetlands. The tidal ebb and flow cause the sea to cyclically rise and fall twice each day exposing vast mud flats for several kilometers before returning to inundate the coast. The Wattenmeer has a high biological diversity and is an important area for both breeding and migrating birds.
The Wattenmeer stretches from the northwest of the Netherlands, past the great river estuaries of Germany to its northern boundary in Denmark. Historically, the coastal regions were often subjected to large floods, resulting in thousands of deaths. Some of these also significantly changed the coastline. Numerous dikes and several causeways have been built and as a result recent floods have resulted in few or no fatalities. This makes the ecologically endangered Wattenmeer among the most human-altered habitats on the planet.
In 2009, parts of the Dutch Waddenzee and German Wattenmeer were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and the Danish part was added in June 2014. (in part from: Wikipedia)
(in part from: Wikipedia)
Environment: imagining the narrative of place
The human activity of imagining… is more than a metaphor; it is a particular
form of practice. Imagining is not just the grasping or the conceptualization
of that which is ‘out there’; it also implies an attempt to render an idea real
by making it the model for future action. In other words, imagining entails
a model of as well as a model for reality. (from: “The critique of culture and
the plurality of nature” by Andreas Roepstorff & Nils Bubandt)
One possible description of the societal role of the artist would echo the
sentence above – to provide models “of” and “for” ways of imagining,
finding meaning within the world we live. This capacity, of course, is
resident in all, but is most often honed and proclaimed by artists, writers,
philosophers, scientists, etc. - creators in all media. There is then the
potential through acts of imagining to render new ways of relationship
with that which we call nature.
The intent here is to provide a few additional connections for new
patterns of affinity with the environment of the Wattenmer (Wadden Sea).
By simultaneously attempting new strategies of imaging while critiquing
and exposing the inherent deficiencies of the technologies we employ,
there is an effort to promote synergy between them. Throwing these
balls in the air at the same time facilitates active attention that tends to
promote a multiplicity of understandings, models of observing – of the
landscape of the Watt. This strategy also seeks to investigate landscape
in ways that elude conclusion, promoting a spiral of reconsideration and
questioning.
As a critical term ‘observation’ has distinct advantages compared
with terms like realism or naturalism. The latter only describe the
after-effects of certain narrative or dramatic techniques, but when
we think of observation we're bound to consider the prior and
practical matter of how cameras record what they see. (Observation
and Identity, by Roger Sandall; Sight and Sound, Autumn 1972)
So, what envisioned narrative of ‘place’ could there be of the Watt? This
gigantic mud-flat landscape is in constant ebb and flow with the
sweeping tidal transformation cycle that repeats twice each day from
kilometers out a sea to mud-flat and back. This rapid inundation with
slithering priels (channels, small streams cut through mud-flat), is both a
visually subtle and awesomely dynamic environment of haunting
desolation, shimmering with silver beauty as well as a tourist destination
or adventure land for wind-kites or intrepid wattwanderung (watt
wandering).
© text: John Sturgeon, 2009
The Tyranny of Optics
Vision from the camera obscura to digital photography
There is a certain monocularity of vision in place through our instruments
of vision, that places us (the human viewer) at the center of and separate
from what is being observed – out there. This monocularity reflects a
long standing - tyranny of optics - heralded by the optical inventions
following the camera obscura & the technologies of single point
perspective and realized with the explosion of technological inventions of
the19th and 20th centuries.
The crucial aspect of the camera obscura is, that it produces a monocular
perspective, and in doing so, it is differing from all other aesthetic and visual
systems and perspectives, from Ancient classic to Medieval or Asian visual art.
These instruments of vision (camera, video/film, etc.) provide
unprecedented ocular realism and a reliable and familiar narrative
framework for reading a subject. While not diminishing these profound
and obvious contributions, they also limit the way we envision, imagine,
by lending to the construction of a rational narrative of hierarchy,
reaffirming separation of subject and viewer, as we perceive a situation,
place, nature and in this case the environment and landscape of the
Wattenmeer (Wadden Sea).
(...) the camera is the culminating realization (...); the images it furnishes
become, precisely, the currency of that vision, that space (...). Insofar as it is
grounded in the photograph, (…) will contribute to the circulation of this
currency, will bring with it monocular perspective, the positioning of the
spectator/subject in an identification with the camera as the point of a sure
and centrally embracing view. [Stephan Neale, Narrative Space]
So, how to counter, or subvert this monocularity – from within the
panopticon, using the same tool kit, camera, or video? The computer is
opening new options for expanding these options, challenging the
dominant methods of imaging. The current array of Panorama software
for stitching together multiple single point images into perspectives
beyond human vision, offers some potential for this quest. But, perhaps
even more so, would be to subvert these panoramas by attempting to
stitch together multiple images each taken from a unique perspective – as
if one were to “scan” a space – section by section, such as the surface of
the Watt. This kind of view might offer a way of envisioning that alludes
to or perhaps simulates to the way the brain “stitches”, or collages its
collection of visual experience of space and subject. Stitching programs
can construct images beyond the scope of vision. Images obtained from
the electronic microscope can construct accessible images from the micro
level and expands our concept of landscape, implying different levels of
realism and memory construction.
© text: John Sturgeon, 2009
Cartography
Cartography/ representation, landscape & the multi-perspectival:
All that seeks to define territory exactly is distorted by: scale, relativity,
proximity, time, motion (misdirection), saturation and assumptions of
continuity. All that seeks to distinguish territory with an inherent
inexplicability fosters the non-linear, the montage, collage, and poetry.
Cartography (in Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and
practice of making geographical maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and
technique, cartography builds on the premise that we can model reality in ways
that communicate spatial information effectively. [Wikipedia]
The history of cartography is fraught with the problems of representation
and issues of scale. The Cartesian grid overlays of land and sea are
formal devices of ordering and objectifying nature for some social
purpose – ownership or consumption, nationalism or tourism.
Scientific, artistic, and political fields converge in using technology not
simply as a means of human productivity, but as a way of constructing
knowledge. —
Knowing, as research, calls whatever is to account with regard to the way in
which and the extent to which it lets itself be put at the disposal of
representation. Research has disposal over anything that is when it can
either calculate it in its future course in advance or verify a calculation
about it as past. Nature in being calculated in advance . . . becomes, as it
were, ‘set in place.’ Nature . . . becomes the object of a representing that
explains. [Ron Broglio, “Wordsworth and Technology Mapping British Earth
and Sky, Georgia Tech.doc]
Ever since the invention of the wireless shattered the cohesion of time
and space, we find ourselves in an every increasing quest for defining
where we are and whom we are in relation to where we are not, and that
which we are not. The obsession with power and control demands
increasing levels of believability in the accuracy, facticity of
representation – cartographic or photographic. Yet, as long as our
attempts to do so are seen as “transparent representation of reality”
[Broglio] they lead to further isolation from nature and engender a
withering separation from awe.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1960 a short story that described the ambition
of a group of imaginary cartographers to represent an empire to
perfection: ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (by Jorge Luis Borges).
. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the
Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no
longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire
whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with
it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of
Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was
Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up
to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still
today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and
Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of
Geography.
“Thus, in its bid for full and complete representation, the map moved
closer and closer to coinciding with the territory to be mapped. Quite
literally, the map promised (or threatened) complete coverage. Borges
leaves us with an image of the map slowly wearing away, stretched and
torn and tattered over its lands, inhabited by Animals and
Beggars. Borges’s Map of Empire recalls an ideal of representation that,
in retrospect, we associate with Cold War intelligence and academic
disciplines centered on nations, areas, and regions…” [Barlow, Tani E.,
Hanawa, Yukiko, LaMarre, Thomas, 1959-Lowe, Donald M., Editors’ Introduction
positions: east asia cultures critique – Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 1-8]
Flawed Gestures:
Confronting environmental issues, global problems – asks first to
somehow represent that environment effectively, to create identity with
the space that environment and issues occupy – in a sense to map. To
this end seeking new modes and attitudes of visual expression of
environment are essential to foster new perspectives for solutions to the
unimaginable – that which has yet to be imaged. Acknowledging the
constructed bias of any such representational attempts through
technology, the offering that even our – panoramic mapping failures – of
the vast surface and totality of the active processes of the watt have value
for highlighting these inherent problems of technological
representation. Or, perhaps in some poetic sense, these flawed gestures
sketch meaningful cyphers that parenthesize an inability of capturing the
whole. At some depth, they may serve as reminders that allude to an
inherent inexplicability of the environment – of landscape.
© text: John Sturgeon, 2009
