Machinic Landscapes: Aesthetics of the Nonhuman

Abstract

If the Anthropocene marks a changed way of being in the world resulting from the integration of human activity and geological processes, a main question is how this situation may be aesthetically represented and with what implications. This article sketches an aesthetics of the Anthropocene by analyzing artistic engagements with advanced tools of visual calculation used in the context of the environment; it explores what I term machinic landscapes. Machinic landscapes are landscape works made by contemporary artists using forms of machine vision and involve a confrontation between two mediums, that of the logic and the representational mechanisms of its technology and that of the forms and processes found in nature and the environment and the multiple layers of representation that emerge and further generate through this. The bringing together of the terms machinic and landscape is meant to counter binaries between nature and technology and to foreground ways in which forms found in the natural environment are integrated into the functioning of a technical, aesthetic gesture by machine. Here I focus on the work of contemporary artists Mishka Henner, Daniel Lefcourt, and Davide Quayola, each of whom works with the digital visualizing programs often utilized in fields of landscape architecture and the geosciences including heightmapping, LiDAR, 3D scanning, and satellite imaging systems to produce artistic forms of landscape. Through their artworks, these artists experiment with parameters of technologies outside the contexts of scientific implementation, revealing multiplicities of machinic aesthetic output and their limitations. I argue that these machinic landscapes provide speculative outcomes and alternative imaginaries that directly address some of the aesthetic challenges of the Anthropocene—specifically, issues of latency, entanglement, and scale. Drawing on landscape theory, philosophy of technology, and concepts within geography to frame this study, this article revisits the art historical genre of landscape as a vehicle to explore contemporary aesthetic and political dimensions of our relationship to and in the environment.