TBT: image
D/A: eidetic
Corner describes the conceptual and cultural meanings that are latent in the term landscape. Critical to his investigation is the inseparable quality that imagery has played into shaping the definition. Originating from the term landskip, Western paintings depicting nature were the first to imagine and influence the shaping of environments from gardens, estates, to vistas. Corner points to this moment as having a lasting but dark legacy (see Foucoult`s visual regimes) where conventional landscape practitioners have come to assume pictorializing imagery- a method of representation that prioritizes visual and formal qualities.
The limitations of such a representation technique range from its inability to represent concepts of knowing, belonging, and even experiencing landscape:
"landscape can often obscure from its occupants the ideological impulses that motivated its formations and instead foster in them the feeling that they are in possession of a beautiful and innocent past, that they have escaped from the inequities and problems of the present(157)"
Since Corner believes that such imagery practices exercises agency in the way we create landscape, he calls out to the profession and discipline to reconsider, revise, enhance, and invent forms of representation techniques that might engender more engaging landscapes than the pictorializing conventions of contemporary practice (see his discussion on landskip vs. landshaft ).
If we are to agree with Corner that "imaging always exercises agency" (160) this inevitably asks of a designer, what kind of imaging approach could be developed and advanced? Corner advocates the eidetic image:
"a mental conception that my be picturable but may be equally acoustic, tactile, cognitive, or intuitive...Unlike the purely retinal impression of pictures, eidetic images contain a broad range of ideas that lie at the core of human creativity. Consequently, how one imagines these kind of images are more active than this, engendering, unfolding, and participating in emergent realities (160)."
Such eidetic images are fundamental to creativity and invention as they do not represent the reality of an idea, rather inaugurate as its possibility (163). Revisions in fundamental imaging techniques such as mapping, planning, diagramming, and sectioning effectively liberates the designer/planner from representation. This does not mean the complete reinvention of the already established techniques nor advocation of a hermetic visual language, rather they can derive subtly from the codes and techniques established from mapping, collaging, analytical and quantitative maps/charts, and orthographic views of plans and sections. Furthermore, the designer's ability to "hybridize" or "composite" these techniques allows him to advance in landscape formations. Layering, seperating, and montaging results in new technigraphics: ideograms, imagetexts, scorings, pictographs, indexes, samples, game boards, cognitive tracings, and scalings. This allows designer to project forward performative aspects as demonstrated by designers such as Koohaus, Tschumi, MVRDV.
The introduction of these new kinds of imagery techniques also means a shift in how we think about
about landscapes:
"shift from object appearance to processes of formation, dynamics of occupancy,….role of landscape architect is less to picture or represent these activities then it is to facilitate, instigate, and diversify their effects in time, then the development of more performative forms of imaging (as devising, enabling, unfolding techniques) is fundamental to this task (165)."
Corner's advancement of the eidetic imagery beyond our visual-aural sensing capabilities is appreciated, to what extent should this be pushed? For example, Corner implies richer experiences to be gained at the cognitive level but what about covering all grounds of the other missing senses- taste and smell? Imagine tasty flickering drawings projected on the studio walls with sprayed down with scratch-n-sniff adhesives. How about imagining and representing other more subtle bodily sensations such as balance and acceleration, temperature, pressure detection, kinaestehtic sense, and even direction? Cutting edge virtual reality simulations can achieve these sensations but this starts to question if these eidetic images any different than say dreams or hallucinations?
Can all this be alluded to, just by our 5 sensing limitations of a drawing? Inevitably, expanding representation techniques in architecture starts to imply a certain visual sensibility that a graphic designer might similarly hold in evaluating and prioritizing ideas are being communicated. One has to ask, is there any real need to go beyond what we are capable understanding (i.e. the five senses)? And to what end? In other words, how do we prioritize these senses in these representation technqiues.
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