If “landscape art can only represent the void and architecture only simulate” (Fox, 2000;52), what can landscape animation do?
Local wastelands and discarded objects can simulate one perception of Antarctic landscape.
That Antarctica is such a void is just a human view. It teams with microscopic life.
Is representing Antarctica as void another ‘terra nullius’ ploy, to care not for what’s living there, and take what we think we need?
Animation brings to life. It does not set on canvas or rest in stone, forgotten in some collection.
.
We put things to rest,
we put things to rest,
It all goes to rest,
white chalk, on my shoe,
white chalk, on my soles
if it’s safer to love the devil you know than the devil you don’t,
I wish somebody had told me before I got choked.
– White Noise, Lyrics
Jack Colwell
Response to Landscape animation can gesture change
This idea that man need be in landscape and alter that landscape to make it not a void is faulty and destructive. For people to accept that it is important for the land to exist for itself can save areas from destruction. It is Not a void because man has not built and changed and controlled it. It is firstly essential that it survive for itself with out man. Then it is essential for our survival. The systems that exisit in this landscape ( is the landscape) without man are so complex. Our wilderness landscape holds infinite systems that are so complex that one way of seeing them is as a totally random unorganised mess. Yet I begin to see patterns through questioning the things I see on the edge. The behaviour of a stipa seed, (corkscrew grass seed), when wet and dried, the complexity of the spines on an echidna, the tough as a boot qualities of a carp scale these are wonders that hover on the edge of understanding. Part of the ‘void’. Nay not the void but a wonderful natural world, sustaining.