9/02

A.
Landscape
"Physical Geography and subfields like Landscape ecology, and Environmental geography, the technical term landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including physical elements such as landforms, living elements of flora and fauna, abstract elements such as lighting and weather conditions, and human elements, for instance human activity or the built environment."
Wikipedia

I would like to view landscapes as environments created by someone, rather than the typical interpretation of landscape being Mother Nature's incredible ability to create compositions. The artist's ability to create composition comes naturally, quite possibly as natural as Mother Nature does. But what about people that have no artistic ability at all — someone who just wants things to look "better", when typically it really doesnt.

Landscaping
"Landscaping refers to any activity that modifies the visible features of an area of land. Landscaping is both science and art, and requires good observation and design skills. A good landscaper understands the elements of nature and construction, and blends them accordingly.

An early Greek philosopher known for his view that "all is water," spent a considerable time thinking about the nature and scope of landscaping. Some of his students believed that in order for human activity to be considered landscaping, it must be directed toward modifying the physical features of the land itself, including the cultivation and/or manipulation of plants or other flora. Thales rejected this notion, arguing that any aspect of the material world affecting our visual perception of the land was a proper subject for landscaping. Both Plato and Aristotle praised Thales' analysis as a model for philosophy. In the early 20th century, British philosopher G.E. Moore cited Thales' reasoning as one of the few historical examples of how philosophical inquiry has led to genuine human understanding and progress.

Philosophers in the 17th century debated whether visual beauty was a necessary goal of landscaping. With the advent of the positivists by the early 20th century, however, most western philosophers had rejected the notion of an objective esthetic standard for any form of art, including landscaping. Practitioners since the mid-20th century have experimented with jarring visual panoramas that are now generally accepted, at least in western societies, as falling within the scope of landscaping."
Wikipedia


http://www.landscapingideasonline.com/
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/gl_landscaping_design/
http://www.the-landscape-design-site.com/

B.
Digiscape



- Pixels floating around creating things throughout
- Genie effect in OSX that animates three-dimensionally within the flat desktop space
- Random assortment of pixels in CMYK color scheme representing the color scape of computers and a digital landscape all of it's own

C.
Web Work: A HISTORY OF INTERNET ART - ArtForum, May, 2000, by Rachel Greene

"THE TERM "NET.ART" is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term--"net.art"--which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts and images, referring to and merging into one another; it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another's interest through ongoing dialogue. Net.art meant online detournements, discourse instead of singular texts or images, defined more by links, e-mails, and exchanges than by any "optical" aesthetic. Whatever images of net.art projects grace these pages, beware that, seen out of their native HTML, out of their networked, social habitats, they are the net.art equivalents of animals in zoos."

Would net.art still be dominant, through all of the emense changes between 1995 and 2000, if things such as "homepages flaunting hobbies and personal histories, advertising technology companies, or promoting online communities of all stripes" were still at the forefront of the internet? Would things such as this Blog I'm writing in now be something completely different through it's form of personal communication, as changing the E-mail, the number one form of communication for "anyone who was wired to communicate on equal ground, across international boundaries, instantaneously, every day."?