life on mars

Landscaping in Mação

Pop-Up Installation

The first version of the Pop-Up Landscapes installation got up and running in Hangar (BCN) in time for the first Pop-Up Landscapes workshop.

The installation combines landscape photography and sensor technology in order to create an interactive triptych composition using panoramic pictures captured in specific locations. The fragmented imagery allows for the exploration of the visual landscape of the Poble Nou, and at the same time provides an interface for communication between two environments, turning its visualization into a shared, interdependent process.



A primeira versão da instalação Pop-Up Landscapes entrou em funcionamento no Hangar (BCN) a tempo do primeiro workshop Pop-Up Landscapes.

A instalação combina fotografia de paisagem e tecnologia sensorial de modo a criar uma composição tríptica interactiva, usando fotografias panorâmicas de locais específicos. A fragmentação da imagem convida à exploração da paisagem visual do Poble Nou, e ao mesmo tempo providencia um interface para a comunicação entre dois ambientes, tornando a sua visualização num processo partilhado e interdependente.

Landscaping in Poblenou

Pop-Up Landscapes

Pop-Up Landscapes is an intermedia art and research project about interdependence and survival. The project is currently at an early stage of conceptual development and will be realised in various stages, over the coming years (2008-2011). The core aim of the project is to create a public intervention which connects two environments together, within which people can explore their relations to others and their landscapes. Alongside the proposed public interventions other outputs will include exhibition, workshops, DIY project templates and publications. The project has been initiated and is lead by artist-researcher, Teresa Dillon (IRE/UK) and realized in collaboration with designer and media artist Tuomo Tammenpää (FI) and lok Arquitectura (PT/ES).

Experience in Landscape #3

3. Diving in apnea or free-diving in Dean-Blue Hole http://www.prlog.org/
Apnea is the voluntary or involuntary suspension of breathing. Free-diving plays with the time period in which the brain is able to concentrate, reducing its activity and consume to a minimum level of oxygen, and still survive without major damage. In this immersed landscape the body is fully aggregated to the environment, like a suspended rock.

Landscape is created and worked from a state of immersion (from within) in the attempt of assimilation of the environment and the will of perpetuation of experience. It is transformed for the sake of survival.

This transformation is applicable not directly to the landscape but to each of its mechanisms, without exception, adjusting directions in order to adapt, struggling to reinforce control, unsetting so as to place things within new proclaimed boundaries. The application of limit is conducted progressively by the surpassing of previous instituted barriers: breaching to new settlements.

Ultimately, in this conflictuous expression of hospitality, tensed by the strive for territorialization and proliferation of culture, the survivor is the one that sets to outlive.

Experience in Landscape #2

2. Harvey Williams Cushing 1869-1939
Neurosurgeon
The human brain does not work as a processor of information, but as a creator of stable domains. Despite us not being mechanisms of collection, we do try to control our own reality. We can easily be conscientious that our relation to the land involves a constant flow of perceptual phenomenon (vision stimuli, audition, tact…), as well as attitude, posture, emotion, attention, social context, memory, etc. All this mechanisms of experience are concurrent. They are actively and accordingly dimensioned, continually reforming imagery.

Landscape has no definite place or time, nor a specific attributed dimension; it is a unique, yet ever-changing performance, which is brought into evidence in a spacetime interval of experience.

The mechanisms that are involved in the fabrication of landscape are therefore the same that are collaborating on defining the different possibilities of experience: the ones able to cultivate different kinds of scape. They control this plot in an operative way, considering for that purpose occult speculative processes (such as imagination or memory) as important as more commonly identifiable and categorizable variants (for example, sensory perception or positioning). They are naturally occasionally triggered, responding to stimulus and a demand for appropriation.

Experience in Landscape #1

1 .Hasegawa Tohaku 1539-1610
"Pine Trees" - Pair of six-folded screens; ink on paper.156.8 x 356.0cm - Tokyo National Museum
First landscape paintings. This kind of monochromatic register was exclusive to a few trained Japanese artists that would reproduce their experience of landscape after long periods of observation and meditation on the environment. They would then draw as if in free fall, in a continuous act, without corrections and using limited painting resources.

The term Landscape is a recurrence of contemporary speech. It is considered to express an objective representation of territorial presence.

The creative pulse of this representation, that is, the constant projection of the self, is defining individual domains, fragmenting that same territory into multiple realizations of the present continuous.

It is that spontaneous activity – which extends beyond the classical sense of visual perception into deeper realms of cognition – that is often reported and reproduced, resetting the landscape, and thus, giving origin to a new set of projections.