UCL, The Bartlett School of Architecture Master of Architecture in Architectural Design [AVATAR] Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research The Project Report / Friday 18th June 2010
Grafted Landscapes A Virtual Rereading of the Picturesque
Tutor: Shaun Murray Student: Merve Karas E-mail: merve.karas.09@ucl.ac.uk Blog: http://mervekaras.blogspot.com Word count: 5515 words
[A] Introduction
[B] The Dependency of Objects [CONTENTS]
Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position
Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
Rule 3: Light and Shade / Extracting the element of time
Rule 4: Ruins / Disturbing the framework
Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
[C] Conclusion
[A] Introduction [A] Introduction
Fig. 1, Looking across the park from the Corinthian Arch to the south front of Stowe House. This view shows the vast scale of Stowe layout.
Fig. 2, An adaptation of Repton’s (1840) diagram to Stowe Landscape Gardens
The project attempts to intermarry the ideas about subjectivity and dependency of objects with the picturesque theory by recombining the images of Stowe Landscape Gardens, which was designed to create the idealized classical landscape in the 18th century by grafting* the landscapes from different regions within a certain subjectivity. This process is based on the construction of landscape within the landscape through the positioning of objects. The project employs the ideas of philosophers and architects like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Frederick Kiesler and Elizabeth Grosz, who reject the notion of conscious subject or independent object, and argued for interdependence of both subject and object or identifier and identified or exterior and interior. While the owner of gaze has subjectivity in the classical picturesque theory, this project aims at enriching the picturesque theory by giving the subject a more active role than a mere observer, by making him/her a part of the image. Moving from these points, the project argues that the participant’s own view is not only a matter of the line of sight, but more fundamentally an outcome of all previous experiences and knowledge of the participant that totally differs one from another. When this unique perspective intermingles with the object, there opens a possibility for the participants own subjective view, which can be named as a porthole. Nevertheless, the porthole may totally be changed in another look. It is an endless process of rereading which is unique in each time. In this process the observer and the observed are not independent from each other. On the contrary, the observer becomes a part of the observed. This project argues that becoming a part of the image might be possible just by observing it from outside. As Gilpin (1972), the creator of the picturesque said, ‘...the spectator both in scenical, and picturesque representation, must allow himself to be imposed on in everything’. *Graft (v): Incorporate in or attach to something else, especially inappropriately (Oxford Dictionary of English).
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[A] Introduction [A] Introduction
Fig. 3, ‘John Ruskin’s drawing of Abstract Lines’ was used to show that all the most beautiful curves derive from nature (Landscape Style of Repton, Price and Knight 2010).
Fig. 4, ‘The mouldering remains of obsolete taste and fallen magnificence’ The quote is from Knight, but the drawing of a Picturesque ruin comes from the 1842 edition of Price’s essays (Landscape Style of Repton, Price and Knight 2010).
The word “picturesque” was taken from the realm of abstraction; it was tested against reality, and was made to work to describe real things, such as real objects in nature, and thereby acquired many meanings. For example, George Mason gave no less than six meanings to the word: “what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from” (Barbier 1963, p. 98). William Gilpin, on the other hand, transferred it from the realm of art criticism and made it available as an instrument for the analysis, the description, and finally the representation and recording of natural scenery ‘as a frame of mind, an aesthetic attitude involving man in a direct and active relationship with the natural scenery through which he travels’ (Barbier 1963, p. 99). The picturesque theory explains the term “dependency” in its three distinct elements: art, nature and man. Therefore, the various aspects assumed by the picturesque depend on the character of these component parts (Barbier 1963, p.99). Experience is at the centre of this theory, which tries to figure out how far these qualities (art, nature and man) enter into the idea of the picturesque beauty; and how far they mark that difference among objects (Gilpin 1972, p. 7). Repton, Price and Knight each put the ‘transition’ theory into practice (Landscape Style of Repton, Price and Knight 2010).
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[A] Introduction [A] Introduction
The project deals with some of the picturesque principles within the idea of the dependency of objects and the representation of it, which is the consistent rule for all principles of the picturesque. The dependency of objects, as discussed by Gilpin (1972, p. 4), is the ‘...difference between the beautiful and the picturesque appears really to exist, and must depend on some peculiar construction of the object; it may be worthwhile to examine, what that peculiar construction is. We inquire not into the general sources of beauty, either in nature, or in representation... The question simply is, what is that quality in objects, which particularly marks them as picturesque?’ He tries to examine the dependency of objects in order to create a visual system embedded in a subject; however, the concern is to be viewed by the subject from a specific position. In this respect, the questions of the project are whether the consistent elements of the picturesque and their relationships to each other are still consistent and how the dependency of objects and the representation of it changes over time. Indeed, objects have now become more complex than human behaviour (Baudrillard 1996, p. 59). As Grosz (2001, p.65) pointed out, architects deal with controlling and regulating the space ‘according to our needs and purposes’; however, the place of these needs has become an endless continuum* over time that one may not be able to control these any more. In other words, “...neither clearly space nor time but a kind of leakage between the two, the passage of the one into the other” (Grosz 2001).
Fig. 5, Interior views of Endless House model, Kiesler 1959 (cited in Krissel 2003)
Virtual continuum of space was attempted to be physically modelled by Kiesler in his Endless House project. It was an attempt for a space, ‘where the inside of the inside were also so many outsides, and so on, and where the topology of the house space was of parallel construction to the subject’s own experiential vision (Vidler, cited in Bogner & Noever 2001, p.78). * Continuum: Origin Latin, from continuus ‘uninterrupted’. A continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, but the extremes are quite distinct (Oxford Dictionary of English).
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[A] Introduction [A] Introduction Here, Kiesler aims to exploit all the emotions and biological needs of the modern subject. For Kiesler, as he states in the Manifeste du Corréalisme in 1949, ‘The house is neither a machine nor a work of art. In this sense, the Endless House is for Kiesler is a living organism, not just an arrangement of dead material: it lives as a whole and its details... it is the skin of the human body’ (Bogner & Noever 2001, p.94).
Fig. 6, Endless House study, surface treatment, Kiesler 1959 (Bogner& Noever 2001, p. 57)
Fig. 7, Double exposure (Uelsmann 1992)
Inspired by the above mentioned theories and models, this project correlates the ideas in a black vessel hovering on Stowe Landscape Gardens, and deals with the interiority and the skin of this vessel by setting up some relationships between the exterior and the interior of the vessel. Different drawing methods have been used in order to reread the picturesque as a virtual continuum. One of the methods is photography that is used for extracting the element of time by taking a photograph from one place to another by the method of double exposure, and treating the photographic film to photographic paper differently. Another method is making “cameraless” photographs (“photograms” or “rayographs” as named by Dada artist Man Ray) by laying objects directly onto photosensitive paper and exposing them to light (Rayograph 2008). The following method is equating the Adobe After Effects* virtual camera with the observer who is the participant of the vessel. This method is used in order to provide similar conditions on video as some avant-garde photography methods have previously done. The project consists of five parts regarding the five principles of the picturesque. Each part operates one of the picturesque principles in order to examine the relationships of the objects and interactivity of the space in this context. * Adobe After Effects is a digital motion graphics and compositing software published by Adobe Systems. It allows users to animate, alter, and composite media in 2D and 3D space with various built-in tools (Adobe After Effects 2010).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position Stowe Landscape Gardens is situated on a south-facing hillside in mild undulating country to the north of Buckingham; the garden covers approximately 400 acres, all enclosed in an irregular pentagonal framework of avenues and ha-has* with projecting bastions at the corners (Robinson 1990, p. 12). Each structure in this area has a different history, culture, art and different notions of space. These landscapes build up a spatial composition, which give inspirations to painters of picturesque landscapes. Fig. 8, An illustration from Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (Gilpin 1972) A picturesque landscape is a sublime romantic subject treated according to specific rules of composition which ensure varied and broken surfaces and the dramatic use of chiaroscuro (Barbier 1963). A landscape is composed of three parts: a foreground, a middle ground and a distance (Gilpin 1972, p. 92). However, ‘a good landscape may be formed without either of the latter. These parts can be sharply defined or blend imperceptibly into each other, as the nature of the subject dictates, always provided they are treated so as to contribute towards the total effect; for, as Gilpin insists, ‘in every work of art, ... it is a breach of the most express picturesque canon, if the parts engage the eye more than the whole (Barbier 1963, p. 121).
Many of the greatest names in English Georgian art were employed here: the architects Sir John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs, William Kent and Robert Adam; the gardeners Charles Bridgeman and Lancelot Brown; the sculptors John Nost, Peter Scheemakers and John Michael Rysbrack; and the owners themselves, notably Viscount Cobham and Earl Temple, played an important part in the garden’s conception (Robinson 1990, 14). As well as being a major work of art, the Stowe landscape is a monument to the liberal political beliefs of the Whigs, who claim as a result to have established constitutional monarchy and political freedom in England and saw themselves as the defenders of liberty. This political allegiance runs through the garden architecture like a leitmotif, with temples, inscriptions and monuments recalling the vicissitudes of politics in eighteenth-century Britain (Robinson 1990, 12). Initially formal in design, Stowe pioneered the revolution towards the more naturalistic landscapes of grassy vistas, serpentine waters and informal tree-planting that Lancelot Brown (head gardener at Stowe from 1741 to 1751) popularized throughout England, and indeed Europe (Robinson 1990, 14).
*A ha-ha creates a barrier for sheep, cattle, and deer while allowing an unbroken view of the landscape (Tatter 2009).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position
The journey starts with one of the classic picturesque drawing methods, drawing from frames in order to make proportional perspectives within a composition which needed “a foreground, a middle ground and a distance”. This scene was set up with inspiration of a film “The Draughtsman’s Contract”, directed by Peter Greenway, set in the English countryside in 1694.
Fig. 9, The participant of the vessel
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position
Fig. 10, The images from the film “The Draughtsman’s Contract” (Greenaway 1982)
The prominent character is a draughtsman named Mr. Neville, who is asked by a lady named Mrs. Herbert to make twelve drawings of her house from different angles (Greenaway 1982). Although the draughtsman has some rules about everything has to remain while he draws, events start to become strange, object start to change their situation in the garden. Greenaway (cited in Brown 2000) said, ‘’The film is essentially about a draughtsman drawing a landscape. The facets of the drawing and the landscape are compared on another level of representation, the film. I want those three ideas to be present in the whole structure of the movie, so that one is aware that we are making comparisons all the time between the real landscapes”. In the same way, the project purposes to examine the landscape, and the layers underneath of the ordinary surface from several viewings.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position This drawing has been drawn from three different distances in order to reveal the hidden landscape. It is a collage of three different perspectives of the Temple of Ancient Virtue in Stowe. The rule “role of imagination” works here; however, the things that turn on the imagination are not the follies or the intersecting hills, but the molehills in the foreground. The circles on the landscapes show the optical lenses which are in the participant’s hand. These lenses are used to provide different distances from the same point. Neither pictures nor projections are fundamental to the visual experience, but they have become fundamental to our sharing of sight (Evans 1995, p. 357). Thus, the matter is not what the observer draws, but what he/she knows.
Fig. 11, A section of the hovered landscape through across the River Styx to the west, the Temple of Ancient Virtue.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position
Fig. 12, Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, Oil on canvas, 10’5” x 9’1”, 1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid (Ashley 2009)
Michel Foucault reads Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas as portraying a paradoxical relationship between reality and representation. In his interpretation, he constructs a triangular relationship between the painter, the mirror image, and the shadowy man in the background (Ashley 2009). These three elements are linked because they are all representations of a point of reality outside of the painting. In Foucault’s analysis, what is outside the painting gives meaning to what is inside (Foucault 2005). Similarly, the video work in figure 13 was set up in order to act the relationship between the body and the object.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position 08:00
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Fig. 13, Changing the specific position/ Interior and exterior
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 1: Composition / Changing the specific position In the story board (figure 13), both scenes illustrate the simultaneous scenes of participation when the inside is observed. The left scenes are the camcorder’s views looking from the outside, the right scenes are another camcorder’s view looking from the inside. For instance, in the last scene, inside the TV is a porthole* opening onto another space, and the participant is looking at the TV, and at the same time the camcorder sees the participant from the same porthole. This reversed relationship creates and endless continuum between the interior and the exterior. For the participant, the TV is a porthole looking outside; conversely, for camcorder TV is a porthole looking onto the inside. In that case, the interfaces* between the interior and the exterior might be called as portholes of the vessel in the project. The transparency of the portholes does not open onto the outside at all; it makes the vessel the outside world. Baudrillard (1996, p.55) defined the glass as “the access to a secondary state of consciousness... Glass is basis of a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch, it facilitates faster communication between inside and outside, yet at the same time it sets up an invisible but material caesura which prevents such communication from becoming a real opening onto the world”. *A porthole is a small, generally circular, window used on a ship. The function of a porthole, when open, is to permit light and fresh air to enter the dark and often damp below-deck quarters of the vessel. It also affords below-deck occupants a limited, but often much needed view to the outside world. When closed, the porthole provides a strong water-tight, weathertight, and sometimes light-tight barrier (Porthole 2010). *Interface (n): a situation, way or place where two things come together and affect each other (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
Fig. 14, An illustration from “Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty” (Gilpin 1972) Carefully adding an implicit or hidden element to the landscape’s relevant explicit or visible parts allows the spectator’s imagination to run on. In this way, using large vistas (often bathed in light) hidden from the spectator’s view by intersecting slopes in the middle distance; yet on the crest of those slopes small figures are silhouetted, who from their privileged viewpoint, contemplate a prospect that must be left to the spectator’s imagination. ‘Even when a figure cannot be supposed to be placed in a situation proper for viewing a scene, yet considering it as a person travelling through a country, we may go along with him, and conceive the view he will have, when he arrives at such a point, or in such a direction’ (Gilpin, cited in Barbier 1963, p. 137).
Fig. 15, The map of Stowe Landscape Gardens
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
fig.16, The earliest portolan chart example, Carta Pisana, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia 2010).
There are a few pathways which were set up by the designers of Stowe, but the curiosity of the other sides of the slopes changed the direction of journey, and an unusual pathway occurred over time. The dash-dot line on figure 15, shows the pathway of the journey. The continuous intersecting lines show the directions and angles of images. These lines were drawn according to points of view of the participant who positiones in the landscape instinctively. The map serves as a navigation tool, as a “portolan chart”*, with no projection; the chart is based on bearing and distance. This map was drawn in order to determine the landscape together with directions, and it shows the relationship between a point in the garden and the follies around it. Frame 17 and Frame 18 are two intersecting views which show the yellow hatched areas on the map (figure 15). These two frames exemplify the explanation of Repton’s idea on the picturesque: ‘a plain appears a hill, or a hill a plain, according to the point of view from where each is seen’ (Macarthur 2007, p. 189).
*“Portolan” derived its name from port books. Probably of Genoese origin, it is dated about 1275 and drawn on an outstretched sheepskin, the neck (untypically) to the right. The chart gives a remarkably accurate representation of the Mediterranean coastline, derived presumably from sailing directions and the notes and sketches of pilots. There is no graticule of latitude and longitude but a scale of miles is displayed at two places at right angles to each other, presumably to take into account shrinkage (Campbell, cited in The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 2006).
Fig.17, Frame 17
Fig.18, Frame 18
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
These photographs (fig. 19) show the views through the pathway of the journey that is marked on the map. All the images were taken from the same height as the participant’s point of view, 120cm.
Fig. 19, A series of photographic images from the journey
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
This photographic work communicates the layered landscapes of the spectator’s view from the first fourteen frames. The spaces which are on the other side of the intersecting lines on the map are exposed to the views that the participant is supposed to view through. The views that are proposed to be viewed by the observer introduced to the other parts (other side of the slopes) of these views.
Fig. 20, Exploiting the slopes
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
The photographic films of these images were taken from the same point, but from the different directions, and were treated differently in the dark room. The final image shows the back of the slope, which is on the other side of intersecting lines. Gothic Temple built in 1741 by James Gibbs. It is a startling pile of red ironstone with a triangular Elizabethan-inspired plan and elaborate Early English detail, and unique in Gibb’s executed oeuvre and a pioneering work in the history of the Gothic Revival. It is significant in that the style was here overlaid with iconographical or political implications (Watkin 1982, 21).
Fig. 21, A 270° panorama starting from the Gothic Church towards South vista
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
These are attempts have done in order to create an ideal picturesque view on paper, by introducing one perspective to another (double exposing different viewpoints). For this work, there are three certain elements of the project; time, exposures and positioning in actual space. Time is important in terms of duration of exposure and duration of introducing one thing into another. Exposures are drawing the drawings; recomposing and rearticulating the landscape. The idea of repositioning the body in the landscape is for a new alternate picturesque; for different points of view rather than the usual ones.
Fig. 22, Opening the mind to another reality
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 2: Role of Imagination / Intersecting views
This landscape is the construction from the previous panoramic drawing aiming to create a perspective of what has been known, what has been seen before, and redefining different views simultaneously. The method has been applied onto the photographic paper, by changing the photosensitive areas with cut-out matte papers during the exposure times.
Fig. 23, Intersecting views/ a collage work
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 3: Light and Shade / Extracting the element of time
Fig. 24, An illustration from Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (Gilpin 1972) For Gilpin (cited in Barbier 1963, p. 134), light and shade were indeed the life and soul of landscape painting. The system of lighting can equally be reserved, that is to say, ‘the object Fig. 25, The passage of the one into the maybe inlightened, and seen against other/ A phantasmagorical* landscape a gloomy part of the sky. This idea may be represented under various * Phantasmagorical: the incongruous imagery in surforms’ (Barbier 1963, p. 136). real art and literature” (Powys, cited in Word Reference 2010).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 3: Light and Shade / Extracting the element of time
This is the vessel (figure 25) together with its inside and outside. The hidden part looks neither like vessel, nor as if covering landscape. This part becomes something in between the two. In this photogram, the interior is represented by a bottle of gel*, the exterior is a piece of crumpled tracing paper, and the interactive part placed between two is the construction of the skin of the vessel. To put it more simply, the first aim of all modern objects is manipulability (‘Manipulable’ being virtually synonymous with ‘functional’) (Baudrillard 1996, 55). The interior includes many objects and relationships; the exterior is clearer, but when the exterior interacts with the interior, it also becomes a complex structure as the interior. The context of the boundary between the inside and the outside is “more porous and less fixed and rigid than is commonly understood” (Grosz 2001, p.65). Drawing with light and chemicals is as old as photography itself, but emerged again in various avantgarde contexts in the early 1920s (Tate Collection 2010). Technically, solarization is defined as the partial reversal of values in a photograph, accompanied by characteristic edge lines obtained by briefly turning on the lights during development (Lévy 2003, p.143). Man Ray used all kinds of three dimensional objects, sometimes made of glass, whose translucency and shadows created a varying range of gray values, and demonstrated a concern to express the life of objects in a “tangible” way, via photography, revealing their independence and their ability to mean something other than their original purpose (Lévy 2003, p.141). *A gel is a thick, clear, liquid substance (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 3: Light and Shade / Extracting the element of time
Fig. 26, Putting a new appearance from the inside to the outside. Looking across the River Styx to the west, the Temple of Ancient Virtue. which was designed by Kent in 1738. This rotunda with an Ionic colonnade and two arched entrances contains four niches for full-length statues (Stowe Landscape Gardens 2010). This drawing is one of the snapshots from the boundary between the inside and the outside of the vessel.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 3: Light and Shade / Extracting the element of time
It is introducing one material, one direction, one space into another. It is the re-constructing of the landscape by introducing different viewpoints from the landscape with 2d photographic films; different materials with 3d glass object and photosensitive paper, by light. However, in the picturesque theory, the observer is impelled to identify himself/herself with the only figures in the landscape, and thus the artist, by stimulating the imagination, succeeds in opening up his landscape, in suggesting more than actually depicting within the compass Fig. 27, Putting a new appearance from inside to outside. Looking across the River Styx to the west, the Temple of Ancient Virtue
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 3: Light and Shade / Extracting the element of time
This image is looking across the park from the Corinthian Arch to the south front of Stowe House, and introducing the reflection of the park on the lake to the south front of Stowe House. This perspective brings the same views (lake and the reflection of nature on the lake) as the designers of garden have designed to view from Stowe House. The dark surfaces in this folded scenario are looking out through the surface, to the exterior. Light surfaces are opening the mind to another reality, introducing the gaps from the interior to the exterior.
Fig. 28, Extracting the element of time
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 4: Ruins / Glitch: disturbing the framework
Gilpin (cited in Barbier 1963) listed the picturesque advantages ‘which a castle, or any eminent building, receives from a state of ruin’: “It gains irregularity in its general form. We judge of beauty in castles, as we do in figures, in mountains, and other objects. Secondly, a pile gains from a state of ruin, an irregularity in its parts which the eye examines with renewed delight. Lastly, a pile in a state of ruin receives the richest decorations from the various colours, which it acquires from time. It receives the stains of the weather, the incrustations of moss, and the varied tints of flowering weeds” (Gilpin, cited in Barbier 1963, p. 116).
Fig. 29, An illustration from Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (Gilpin 1972)
Though ruins are in a sense artificial elements, he welcomes them as rural embellishments, as they bring into the landscape composition a degree of amenity, and therefore a beauty. As artificial objects in nature ruins are innocuous: through time they have merged into the landscape to form part of our scenery, and the history of our countryside; they are ruins of abbeys and castles peculiar to the English landscape, and as they are ‘naturalized to the soil, might indeed, without much impropriety be classed among it’s natural beauties’ (Gilpin, cited in Barbier 1963, p. 117).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 4: Ruins / Glitch: disturbing the framework The follies* are positioned there for dragging the observer’s eye, and stretches the one’s mental vision with their irregularity, colour and naturalization to the soil. The vessel is there to experience them virtually. The name “vessel” has been given to refer to the name of a scientific experiment that Andre Breton used in his book called “Communicating Vessels”; ‘...in vessels joined by a tube, a gas or liquid passing from one to the other rises to the same level in each, whatever the form of the vessel. This passing back and forth between two modes is shown to be the basis of Surrealist thought, or Surreality itself’ (Caws, cited in Breton 1990). *Folly: Eye-catcher, usually a building in a contrived landscape, often otherwise useless. It demands attention and gives pleasure by its eccentricity (Folly 2010).
Fig. 30, The artificial ruins and the vessel. The drawing shows the revealing of follies, and their relationship according to points of view.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 4: Ruins / Glitch: disturbing the framework
Fig. 31, Rotating the landscapes by superimposing the images. Here, dark surfaces, where two spaces come together, compose the surface of the vessel.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 4: Ruins / Glitch: disturbing the framework
Fig. 32, The vessel reveals on the landscape This is a short animation which shows the vessel hovering on the landscape, and creates an impression on the ground with its shadow. The black vessel was modelled by cutting the dark surfaces of superimposed images of the other side of the slopes which are not where the observer is supposed to stand. The vessel is constructed from the shadows, and it also casts a shadow on the landscape. The idea here comes from cross-fertilization, planting seed from one space to another, because cross-fertilization is literally introducing one space into another. The black vessel represents the idea of being in a corridor which connects two surfaces, and the participant operates inside when the other space is revealed. Glitch is the focus of the system that gives a certain perception of reality; the glitch is what shatters that perception, making you realize that the whole thing was an illusion (Personal Development for Polymaths 2010). These would be successive phases of the image; some the reflection of basic a reality, some masks and perverts a basic reality, some masks the absence of a basic reality, some bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, cited in Poster 2001, p. 173). The interior of the vessel is a corridor where the observer views this glitch in the space.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
A facility in copying the different parts of nature should be attained, before the young artist attempts a whole; “for the various parts of a composition to be brought successfully together into a harmonious whole many things are required. In particular attention must be paid to proportion, simplicity, and harmony” (Gilpin 1972). Proportion: The rules of perspective will help to adjust the relative size and shape of objects in a composition (Barbier 1963, p. 128). Fig. 33, An illustration from Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (Gilpin 1972)
Simplicity: ‘Simplicity arises from the fewness of parts’ (Gilpin, Barbier 1963, p. 128). Harmony: There must be an agreement between colours, while ‘preserving a contrast among the several parts of landscape’ (Gilpin, Barbier 1963, p. 128).
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
There are many ways of taking something from somewhere and introducing it to another place. Fig. 34, The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image, Dali 1938 (Virtual Dali 2010)
In this process, the subject in question loses its meaning, and at the same time, it may acquire another meaning, which is completely different from the original one. As Baudrillard (1994) argues, this ends up almost with hyperreality in terms of the value of an object within a system (Baudrillard 1994). There is an extremely effective connection in Baudrillard’s (1996, p. 53) theory about the system of objects to understand the dependency of objects on the everyday plane: ‘...the whole operation of washing has lost its specificity in space and time; it is a minimal intervention, a timed procedure in which the water itself is no more than an abstract vehicle for detergent chemicals. The washing machine belongs, therefore to a relational field utterly different from that of the old-fashioned washboard or washtub, a functional field of associations which is no longer co-extensive with objective operations, with the refrigerator, with the television, with the components of the interior or with the automobile’.
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
These sequences show the play with the dynamics in the interior space. It is the revealing of everyday objects which have been moved to another space. The object moves in the interior when another porthole into Stowe is revealed. The white spaces which have been revealed are the portholes of the interior, and the white lines show the effect of light to the surface. Changes of light conditions on the surface are the reflection of the dynamics of both moving and stable objects. Fig. 35, The portholes of everyday plane
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
This video work is a representation of previous video works, which are different positions, the hovering vessel, and the portholes of everyday space. Three spaces from different surfaces are communicated here. One from everyday space, one from Stowe, and another is the workshop. The first and the second space reveal each other by moving into the portholes (white spaces), then moving out of portholes. The third space reveals these two spaces, and records them on an interactive glass table by drawing the portholes with pen, painting the nature with brush, and masking the moving images with 3d objects.
Fig. 36, Adding another dimension into the space/ 1
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
Fig. 37, Adding another dimension into the space / 2
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
Two videos, one from everyday space and another from Stowe are brought together with After Effects Virtual Camera. These two videos are reflected on the glass table with a projector (from the computer to the projector), a mirror (from the projector to the white paper which is under the glass surface), and a white paper (from its own surface to the glass table).
Fig. 38 Section of the workshop/ Adding another dimension into the space
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[B] The Dependency of objects Rule 5: Harmony / Communicating different scales
This is the context drawing of the interactive space which shows the participant, an interactive glass table, computer screen, the reflective anamorphic surfaces reflected stem from both double-mirrored transparent perspex (situated by 75째 to the glass table) and the light of projector on the wall and on the ceiling. These anamorphic surfaces show how a space from a different level occurs in a different surface as the reflection of other objects in the space.
Fig. 39, Communicating different scales / Adding another dimension into the space
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[C] Conclusion [C] Conclusion
The project deals with the relationship between the consistent elements of the picturesque (art, nature and man) and their relationship to each other. This project is an attempt to draw a guidance system that interrupts another guidance system which is the picturesque. The project uses avant-garde photographic methods and After Effects virtual camera as the objects in a feedback system. This guidance system, which is called as the portholes of the black vessel in Stowe Landscape Gardens, correlates the environment and the participant as social and emotional beings. In the picturesque theory, the observer knows his/her place, however in this project participant is inside a vessel floating in the landscape; a garden which always drags the observer’s eye. “If we all float, we all float in something: space, the space of the twentieth century” says Bois (cited in Evans 1995, p.339). Furthermore, the project tries to visualize this floating in the space in order to rereading the picturesque virtually, thus, “the potentialities of virtuality articulate a new human response and awareness that is characteristic of the information age (Milam 2002). It has experienced that the consistent elements of the picturesque are still consistent, but their relationship to the environment is not consistent. On the contrary, it is an endless process of rereading, which is unique in each time.
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