When art and digital technology collide, the traditional link between landscape and memory is shattered, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
After a lacklustre 2004 in the world of fine art, it is time to consider where the real innovation is taking place, areas such as the digital landscape. According to the historian, Simon Schama, landscape is inescapably about memory. Urban, rural or coastal landscapes are ways of rescuing the world around us from the impositions of invaders, whether physical (the Romans, the English, the Danes, housing, factories) or metaphorical (new ideas, signs, symbols).
That is changing.
A group of landscape artists in California, named C5, takes the view that landscape can and should be represented in an entirely new way. These artists are not alone.
What epitomises the modern world more than any other phenomenon, they say, is the reduction of all communications to data, to bits of information. Whether we are talking about telephone conversations, television programmes, mobile phone calls, e-mail, PDF documents, digital camera images, satellite pictures, or medical imaging, the common denominator is the incursion of digital data. Why not, say the C5 artists, see landscape through the same binary prism?
In traditional landscape (everything up to the contemporary), we tend to interpret any physical changes in our environment as chiselling away - by other humans, and latterly by the climate - at a state of perfection. The nostalgia of landscape tells and retells the loss of our idealised relationship to nature and the ethnic identity that grows out of that relationship. The forest, in Schama's example, becomes a redoubt because everywhere else some form of despotic ideology is imposing a new and corrupt vision on what nature intended. Landscape is a reminder of nature's intentions and of broken promises.
Whichever way landscape arrives before our eyes, he suggests, an element of nostalgia, of yearning for a purer form of identity and experience, is inescapable. Even seascapes that show an untameable nature and an elemental foreboding urge reminders on the viewer.
Landscapes are also protests against the ways in which others signify our environment with their messages and priorities - against the Coca Cola-isation of the urban landscape, for example. The depictions of the consequences of greed, evident in most urban landscapes, are complaints, grudges as much as protests.
C5's experimental form of landscape breaks the link between landscape and memory and raises questions about the relationship between art and memory. This sounds a little highbrow, but before coming down to earth we need first to go to outer space.
Ever since the mid-1960s the earth's beauty has awed all those who have seen it from outside its natural frontiers. The images we see of space are great art, widening our visual and emotional horizons.
NASA's earth observatory provides a weekly catalogue of new landscapes of planet earth. The images range from African dust blowing across the Atlantic to swamp topography in Argentina, from the Great Lakes freezing over to deep-ocean tsunami waves off Sri Lanka. In each case they are landscapes beyond the imagination of artists, yet they nonetheless have a strong emotional pull once we know their context.
Prof Joel Slayton, C5's president and director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, attached to San José State University in the heart of Silicon Valley, says of the artist's role in the new landscape: "The role of the human is to simply be there to execute the software."
Or download the images from the satellite, he might have added.
Few artists would be so radical, and indeed his comments could be read as a geek's charter, but CADRE represents one of the many attempts globally (similar to that of our own recently closed Media Lab Europe) to merge technology and art. CADRE has the benefit of working close to the centre of the computing industry, and Slayton himself chairs the editorial board of the MIT Press's Leonardo book series on the convergence of art, science and technology. (He has also exhibited at the San José Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.)
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY is clear. Digital technology captures an infinite amount of data. Experience over the past 20 years has shown that visual representations of that data make more immediate sense than literary ones. Think of the browser on your PC: if you were not supported by a browser that visualised data for you, and helped you to visualise your route through data, you would have a lot of reading to do, most of it being nowhere near as compelling as the combination of imagery and mapping that you get with Internet Explorer 6.0. In the digital world, browsers are perfect combinations of our digital present and analogue past.
In C5's vision of art, mapping the relationship between people and data is as important as visualising it. People create data, and their interaction with the physical world is data that needs to be part of any landscape.
The mapping process in C5's landscape project also has a parallel in the analogue world. Think of the Mercator maps of the 16th century and you get a stronger sense of how maps can be symbolically representative even when inaccurate. Mercator maps are pictograms, images that speak volumes, just like browsers. But they also represent experiences.
The new digital landscape takes that principle into the world of fine art. Organisations such as CADRE are fine-art learning institutions. But fine art is created through raw data.
Arguably, while traditional artists struggle to create controversial imagery in installations based on everyday life, technology has supplied the most breathtaking images in history with little or no help from artists as we conventionally understand them. Technology continues to offer that possibility, on a continuum from the interior of the body to outer space and everything in between.
Its raw material, though, is binary. Digital artists argue that participating in the collection of data and developing software that visualises what people do and how their activity is seen is fundamentally a set of artistic tasks.
"I would say that technology provides a way in which the informational and physical merge into a new form of landscape experience," says Slayton. "There is what I refer to as a type of 'concurrency' that is established between the tracking of human presence in time and space, database representation of the land, and technology mediation of real experience."
In other words, if you drive around in a car with a satellite navigation system, you create data about your position in an environment. That data can be visualised in many ways.
What the C5 artists try to do is create visualisations of landscapes with people in transit. In most cases this means data collected by geo-orbiting satellites from people carrying transponders, or transmitters of location data.
C5 artists scale mountains and do the Great Wall carrying devices that satellites can track. The data they collect relates both to the contours of the mountains and to their own progress through it. It is a gimmick, but so too is the display of a dead shark, as in Damien Hirst's work.
Here, arguably, though, when the artist gets it right, are the bones of a real perspective on the world, on populated land. It is the perspective of the person who moves through the landscape: the farmer, the climber, the trekker and, of course, the viewer.
THE C5 ARTISTS work with their feet on the ground but at altitudes of up to 8,000 metres. They began their research with missions to Mount Shasta and Mount Whitney in California and Mount Fuji in Japan.
These treks have created the data for commissioned sculptures.Their end result will be a range of new images, new ways of seeing a landscape, a resource for people to explore landscape, a new way of representing physical reality, and a sculpture - all produced without an artist.
The new type of landscape artist represented by C5 has a point to prove, principally that by collecting and manipulating data as any researcher would, an "artist" can create images that are as significant as any produced in the studio or in installations.
The images have a haunting presence. They represent the essential break with the nostalgic, memorial function of previous landscape. There is no memorial function in these images. They are exploratory and intellectually conceived, and break new ground, as any art should. What they become depends on the persistence, ingenuity and focus of the people who created them. We must wait and see.