Book Chapter – Envisaging the Deep – imagining a relational geography of the uninhabitable

“Sub-maritime environments present a particular challenge to systems of optical survey the combined effects of darkness and pressure necessitating that they be mapped by sonar and the resulting acoustic data painstakingly reprocessed so as to create virtual 3D models, artificially lit, coloured and drained of water in order to enhance their legibility. This text and my work as Artist in Residence at the National Oceanography Centre has focussed on the implications of this extra visual condition as related to both the use of optics to render the world as observable phenomena and an epistemology of distance occasioned by observation as a mode of encounter. In response I have produced a series of exploratory works that  promote reflection on methods of oceanographic survey documenting and intervening within them.”

Emerging Landscapes brings together scholars and practitioners working in a wide range of disciplines within the fields of the built environment and visual arts to explore landscape as an idea, an image, and a material practice in an increasingly globalized world. Drawing on the synergies between the fields of architecture and photography, this collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining practice-based research with scholarly essays. It explores and critically reassesses the interface between representation – the imaginary and symbolic shaping of the human environment – and production – the physical and material changes wrought on the land. At a time of environmental crisis and the ’end of nature, ’shifting geopolitical boundaries and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes reflects on the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping landscape.