Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, James Corner

· landscape — 'landskip': picture of land. the framing and view of the land led to the introduction of artifice to an 'unmediated environment.'

> can this be seen in most places, globally, or is this phenomenon enveloped, even now?

> what about eastern 'landscaping' design?

· land as landscape realized through exposure to prior imagery influencing design, and construction is helped by various ways of imaging.

· eidetic imaging — mental conception: picturable, acoustic, tactile, cognitive, and or intuitive.

· "how one 'images' the world literally conditions how reality is both conceptualized and shaped."

· paper and computer screens are more than realms of the 2D or virtuality — they are test-fields for theories and practices — the pre-production media.

· land/scape as geographical or representational: 'landschaff' as opposed to 'landskip' meant the organization of land in a working community — building field, patterns of occupation, activity and space, and calendrical time." — characteristics which don't rely upon schematization, but which evolved through use and habit.

· insider v. outsider's view of landscape: insider — distracted, use, habit; outsider — attention.

· landscape effects use/vision in precisely the way it has been imaged — if done synoptically it will not bear intimacy.

· "much of the so-called modern critique is targeted at exposing the authoritarian and alienating characteristics of synoptic objectification, including master planning (aerial regimes) and scenography (oblique and perspective regimes)."

· detachment of the subject (landscape as object) creates a mood of estrangement and alienation — when not thought of as playing a part in the complexities of reality.

> does 'landscape' or mediated land-parks, etc. necessarily have to be calling to our past? is land not timeless?

· "evil and invention are hidden"

· "scenic landscape displaces the viewing subject in space and time, and displaces the objects that it contains."

 · landscape that is designed will lose the touch of the design, revert back to a more 'wild' or untouched character. this is deceptive because the power to affect and maintain has certain social merit — and the reverse will show consequence.

> 'timelessness' of land/landscape — is land and its operations or operation upon it — are these viewed through a lens of technology, the technologies used and available to operate upon that land? what happens when technology is lost (i.e. machu picchu stonework)? do we not eventually replace lost technologies? land is always trying to return to disorder — or rather, its own order. in this sense land = fauna, flora, terra. it is self-referential and self-ordering.

 · participation in landscape is due to its place in the marketplace — "it is available only at a price." thus the idea that landscape is culturally or regionally significant is not necessarily true — it is instead (commercially) significant.

 · "the veil of pretense that landscape erects is not, however, impermeable. in fact, its dominant, idealizing, and objectifying effects are broken everyday. the erring realities of life contaminate the purity of any dominant master plan; an infinite number of 'happenings' lend irony and disjuncture to a given scene."

· "the landscape construct is inherently unstable (an indeterminate dimension that can be opened up through artistic practices and made to reveal alternative sets of possibility.)"

> isn't any human endeavor that is based around the tangible unstable? aren't we all unstable — all, everything leads to disorder, or self-order, all beyond human predilection.

· using landscape as a shield or veil for inherent problems is not skillful.

· also recreating public spaces in the fashion of the past "does not guarantee, and may actually retard the performance of authentic public life..."

> what is "authentic public life"?

· "the pictorial impulse denies deeper modes of existence, interrelationship, and creativity... limits the design and planning arts in more critically shaping alternative cultural relationships with the earth."

· "descriptive analysis of historians and geographers has traditionally focused upon land used for work, in work, rather than the speculative nature of the analysis done by landscape architects."

· "is it possible to realign the landscape architectural project toward the productive and participatory phenomena of the everyday, working landscape?

> is the idea that land should be used/inhabited or at least worked upon — or the notion that participation with the land is a "real" thing, is a good thing, is more true than artifice — is this not also some sort of obsolescence? the fact that the majority of cultures which invest in landscape architecture, and the places in which landscape architecture is practiced — are not these also cultures which are so wholly independent from the land? there is no need for the average person to participate with it, no necessity. we are somewhat insular. so why the desire to create an "authentic" landscape, one of habit, tracing use? the most obvious landscape shift that reveals our contemporary use of land is the paving over of it. most of michigan's highways were built upon old indian trails. much of the way we experience "land" now — everyday — is through a car window. we "participate" by following the trails of yellow lines. there is still earth beneath the road. our participation becomes a "negative" force, backgrounding what was before in the foreground. waxing contrarian, why is there emphasis being placed upon engendering any relationship with the landscape, when the most contemporary behavior toward landscape is to ignore it, physically, through the actions of paving over and building over it?

· "emphasis upon experiential intimacies of engagement, participation, and use over time, and to place geometrical and formal concerns in the service of human economy."

· "in the working landschaft, performance and event assumes conceptual precedence over appearance and sign."

· "object appearances" v. "processes of formation, dynamics of occupancy, poetics of becoming."

· "ameliorative, scenographic designs" v. "productive, engendering strategies"

· appearance v. function. "how things work, what they do, how they interact, performance over time."

· "imaging always exercises agency — actively unfolding, generating, and actualizing emergent realities."

· "while theorists and historians focus on the object or the idea, designers focus on the actual activities of creativity, with the 'doing' and with the often bewildering effects of bodying forth things neither foreseen nor predetermined."

· question lies in what kind of 'imaging activities' should be undertaken: "the experience of mapping, drawing, modeling, making a generative sequence in creative thinking."

· mitchell's five families of imaging: the graphic, the optical, the perceptual, the mental, the verbal.

· "not all images are picturable." ideas lead us to a certain perception, but it's more a "perception of essences, an aesthetic of invisibility."

· the landschaft paradigm "can be likened to a spatio-organizational image — mental map. highly situated and subjectively constituted schemata, eidetic mappings lie at the core of shaping an invisible landscape, one that is more an unfolding spatiality than surface appearance, more poetic property than the delineation of immediate real estate."

· problems of representation — in conventional forms: plan, perspective, rendering. also the limitations of 'pictorial' representation over other "aspects of knowing and belonging..., other dimensions of being."

· new techniques: "eidetic operations": specific ideational techniques for construing (imagining) and constructing (projecting) new landscapes.

· "imaging has a metaphoric agency in that the (most arbitrary) bringing together of two or more elements fosters a host of associative possibilities."

· "ideogram: the pairing of two elements to produce a new image, a conception that is otherwise not picturable."

· "simultaneity of instrumental and representational thinking."

· reworking conventions, realignment of what is already known, to produce a new effect.

· datascaping reformulates given conditions in such a way as to produce novel and inventive solutions.

· "concentrating on how things work, how they go together, an dhow the project makes sense — accords priority to the working of inhabited grounds as opposed to the formalization of scenic landscapes."

· Sanford Kwinter: "diagrams do not themselves produce form... but rather [they] emit formative and organizational influence, shape-giving pressures that cannot help but be 'embodied' in all subsequent states of the given region of concrete reality in which they act."

· "...incorporating multiple levels of information; they avoid immediacy and reduction."

· "through utilizing a variety of analytic and analogous imaging techniques, otherwise disparate parts can be brought into productive relationship, less as parts of a visual composition and more as a means or agents."