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Technology informs the construction
of subjectivity. In Gilpin’s reference to the camera obscura, human sight
takes as its model mechanical projection: "The imagination becomes a camera
obscura, only with this difference, that the camera represents objects
as they really are; while the imagination, impressed with the most beautiful
scenes, and chastened by rules of art, forms its pictures, not from the
most admirable parts of nature; but in the best taste." (Three Essays
52) As Martin Jay points out in Downcast Eyes, sight is a privileged
epistemological tool . Our way of seeing and thinking about the world around
us is informed by the camera obscura and its historical derivative, the
camera. These machines define the position of the interiorized observer
to the outside world (Crary Chapter 2). By setting landscape aesthetics
next to the aestheicts of Kodak, I want students to explore how the camera
works in relation to the picturesque. My hope is that they discover
some basic assumptions about how observers in the 19th century and the
present represent their relationship to the world. The dominant way of
seeing both then and now is what Jay calls "Cartesian perspectivalism,"
a method of perception that represents space and the subjects and objects
in that space according to the rules of Euclidean geometry. Developing
the historical relationship between optics, the picturesque, and the camera
de-naturalizes the Cartesian scopic regime. By disturbing the relationship
between sight and truth, including the picture as a true representation
and tour guides as accurate documents of places, students can begin thinking
of other modes of representing place and experience.
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In my "Optics
and Aesthetics" course, during the first half of the semester I work
with students to help them understand Cartesian perspectivalism. The class
reads sections of Descartes’s Optics with Jonathan Crary’s commentaries
from Techniques of the Observer, then turns to Burke, Gilpin, and
various Romantic works that incorporate the picturesque. As a mid-term
project, students compare
and contrast the picturesque with Kodak’s web site on how to take pictures.
They then go into the field and take "picturesque" snapshots according
to the guidelines set out by Kodak and by the picturesque aesthetic. They
put these photos online with commentaries on each and with links to passages
from authors we have studied. The second half of the semester is spent
working on a phenomenological critique of the way of seeing established
in the first half of the course. In class, we look at how new media, particularly
the web and MOOs, reconfigure our representations of space. As a final
project, students add to their picturesque web site other decidedly non-picturesque
photos of the same location with an eye toward other ways of providing
a "feel" for the place. Additionally, we discuss web page designs and site
architecture that facilitate their non-picturesque representations.
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Using the web and MOO to discuss landscapes adds
a new dimension to understanding representation of place. I ask students
to take snapshots of a place and then have them use the photos in a group
of web pages designed to represent that space. By having students
build web pages that in their form suggest the ideas from the content of
their argument, students engage the problem of constructing representational
spaces. The images, font, background color, links and word choice
all become part of their attempt to convey the "genius of the place."
As students produce their own representation or "virtual guide" to a place,
they begin to ask different questions about the authors we've studied.
To represent place they must model their writing according to the abstract
discourse of Gilpin or the intimate journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, or
they may use both discourses and set them against each other in a series
of web pages. As they construct image and text in their sites, they
look at the way Gilpin uses illustrations in his tour guide, and they reconsider
Constable's letters about his paintings.
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Importantly, the links between pages become a part of
the argument since the reader is asked to construct the relationship between
the two pages via the connecting link word or image. In the logic
of linking pages, what words and images should provide portals to other
aspects of a landscape? The dizzying connections Wordsworth makes
in his Snowdon passage from The Prelude invite students to think
about how to link disparate elements in a landscape we half see and half
create. In contrast, the methodical categories of Gilpin's and Wordsworth's
tour guides provide other ways of moving through space. My hope is
that through their own creative project, students will discover how the
epistemologies that inform the landscape aesthetic of the Romantic period
effect the way writers and artists of the period both saw and presented
the land. By having students use cameras to capture images of the
land they choosen to represent, I am asking them to work within the same
mechanical optics that dominated much of landscape aesthetics. Of
course, as they place these images on web pages, the shift in representational
medium allows students the possibility of breaking out of Cartesian perspectivalism
as a model for mediation between viewer and object viewed.
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In addition to web pages, students visit MOO rooms to
develop a sense of space. (See student
instructions.) The MOO is a non-space; that is, there is no "space"
other than a screen with words and, perhaps, some images. Yet, depending
on the words used to describe the MOO "room" students act differently in
each place. After logging and discussing MOO landscapes in Villa
Diodati, I ask students what verbal cues caused them to react the way they
did to the space. The result is a discussion about the role of text
and the role of imagination in creating space. Such a discussion
enables them to see Romantic texts in a new light. The interaction
in the MOO helps defamiliarize the act of reading landscape texts and allows
for new interpretive strategies in reading. The MOO with its rooms,
descriptions, objects, and programmed interactive verbs is a digital interpretation
of a literary text. Students examine the role of proper nouns that
are embodied as objects in the MOO room. They discuss the movement of the
narrator throught the space. They scrutinize descriptive words and programmed
verbs. Additionally, the MOO players see slight differences in the
room and each player acts on these differences through the MOO conversation.
"Seeing" or reading and imagining differences provides a classroom discussion
concerning what we assume about nature and how to act in nature.
Some students treat the MOO room a utopic nature place. Others treat
the space with suspicion or even contempt, preferring a narrative poem
with its familiar cues or finding a digital and textual representation
of nature to be absurd. Such moments are important for understanding
how mediation--be it paper or digital--effects representation of place
and how any description creates a "virtual" world.
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Often, students who consider themselves
poor readers but quite skilled in computers (which includes a disproportionately
large number of students at Georgia Tech where I teach) find themselves
drawn into the problems of representing space as they begin playing with
their hypertext documents. They debate on how to best represent the land
and what discourse best represents their experience of interacting
with the land. The overarching question becomes, "How can I make the land
into a landscape and what price do I pay for such a representation?" While
I have not tried this approach, such moments seem ripe for exploring issues
laid out in Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" and treatments
of nature developed by eco-criticism and Green Romanticism. Admittedly,
a good deal of class time gets diverted from the study of Romantic texts,
and the class' detailed reading of a select few texts leaves little time
for a broad coverage of the period; however, I find the questions raised
in class and the engagement of the students in their projects to be more
important and more far reaching than what I am able to accomplish with
a wider range of the period texts.
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While landscape aesthetics circa
1800 seems quite distant and inaccessible to most students, taking pictures
with a disposable camera is rather commonplace. By allowing students to
explore Romantic texts through a contemporary "lens," students find the
texts more approachable. They have little problem talking about their experiences
and their photography. Eventually this freedom of discussion transfers
to their discussion of Romantic texts. Then, as I ask them to discuss their
photos in relation to the Romantic texts, the task seems less daunting.
Kodak and landscapes are not a perfect fit--nor should they be. The differences
are important for putting the two cultures and activities in context. For
example, good taste is a cue for class and education in landscape aesthetics.
Photography in the late 1800s had similar class, education, and gender
distinctions, but by the 1900s this gradually fades, making photography
simple and accessible to virtually everyone (West Chapter 2). I use Kodak
and the picturesque as a starting place for beginning the conversation
by which the students' culture and the Romantics' culture can speak to
one another. In this conversation, students bring as much to the class
with their opinions about photography and sense of place as I do in presenting
them with Romantic texts. By the end of the semester, their sense of what
a photo is and does gets placed within a much larger conceptual field of
representation from landscapes of the 1800s to digital technology of 2000.
Conversely, Romantic texts become for the students not simply historical
moments of seeing but become a vantage point to explore concerns over optical
perceptions still vital to us today.
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Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. Remediations. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1999. Burk, George. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . New York: Penguin, 1999. Crarey, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1992. Galassi, Peter. Before Photography. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981. Gilpin, William. Observations on Cumberland and Westmoreland. 1786. New York: Woodstock Books, 1996. ---. Three Essays on the Picturesque. 1792. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1983 Gray, Thomas. Correspondence of Thomas Gray. Vol. 2 Ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. Kodak Web Site. www.kodak.com. Accessed September 27, 2000. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1964. ---. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1968. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: Distributed by MIT Press, 1997, c1991. West, Nancy Martha. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville: UP Virgina, 2000. |
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