Inside the Landscape

Immersion or Kinesthesis?

Abstract

Though structures of feeling are always hard to pin-point, a shared feeling that the last three or four decades have witnessed a radical change in the way we perceive our visible world is equally hard to deny. This holds especially true in the case of traditional notions of landscape. In this essay, I will first identify a few signs or clues pointing to recent new ways of seeing and perceiving places, then, I will work out a few general trends, and in the end, I will try to synthesize three models of landscape that, in my view, increasingly shape our perceptions. My clues will include three clusters: the changed attitudes one displays vis-à-vis visual technologies; the new ways in which tourists behave and the new travel-guides that give form to their tastes and choices; the senses that have replaced sight in defining landscape, especially with the rise of the notion of soundscape. Three trends can be inferred from such clues: first, our landscape is steadily made dynamic both by highlighting the pathways one can follow in it, and by representing it in motion; secondly, objective landscape observation and representation have been replaced by an appropriating attitude endowing landscapes with identity claims. As a result, three models of landscape ensue: an environmental landscape, a puzzle-landscape, and finally, a traditional landscape.