Landscape has recently achieved a broad intellectual prominence as a theoretical concept across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Its complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized in relation to processes of cultural modernization. Landscape's roots in territorially based community governed by customary law have never been wholly destroyed and an analysis of the evolution of landscapes in Southern California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the context of hypermodernity.

Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea:

Human computer interaction (HCI) has little explored everyday life and enriching experiences in rural, wilderness and other predominantly "natural" places despite their socioeconomic importance. Beyond simply addressing the challenge arising from applying an urban perspective to designing technologies for use in natural places, we wish to provoke integration of the natural and computational worlds. To stimulate design that both draws upon and affords such integration, we propose seven themes we have distilled from the literature and supplement these with our own research observations. Bodies Imagine and Remember recognizes the inseparability of meanings and corporeal experience of natural places for design. Indexicality and Habitus refers to the need for design to be sensitive to the processes by which natural features become intelligible in our actions and communication. Values and Story-spaces observes the way representations and infrastructures, infused with particular values, become dominant. Identity and Belonging, suggests the need to reconcile designs with couplings between physical settings, processes of community and personal identity. Rhythm and Dynamism considers links between people's daily routines, nature's events and patterns and spatial and social issues pertinent to design and in Revealing and Receding we suggest that design must simultaneously fade into the background and provoke seeing natural places differently. Fragility, Liability and Spirituality refers to technological opportunities to support positive relations within ecosystems and recognizing the limits of technological control.

Pursuing genius loci: interaction design and natural places

Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.

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Rethinking space: an outsider's view of the spatial turn

This study examines spatial dimensions of state violence against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and the creation of a place of surveillance, the famous House of Writers (Budynok Slovo), an apartment building that was conceived by an association of writers “Slovo” in Kharkiv This building fashioned an important identity for Ukrainian intellectuals, which was altered under state pressure and the fear of being exterminated Their creative art was gradually transformed into the art of living and surviving under the terror, a feature of a regimented society The study explores the writers’ behavior during arrests and interrogation, and examines the Soviet secret police’s tactics employed in interrogation rooms 

The narrative considers the space of politics that brought the perpetrators of terror and their victims closer to each other, eventually forcing them to share the same place Within this space and place they became interchangeable and interchanged, and ultimately were physically eliminated Importantly, the research illuminates the multiethnic composition of the building’s residents: among them were cultural figures of Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish origins Their individual histories and contributions to Ukrainian culture demonstrate the vector of Stalin’s terror which targeted not Ukrainian ethnicity as such but instead was directed against the development of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian statehood that were perceived as a challenge to the center’s control and as harbingers of separatism 

The study also reveals that the state launched the course of counter-Ukrainization in 1926 and disintegrated the Ukrainian intellectual community through mass repressive operations which the secret police began to apply from 1929 The study also demonstrates that, together with people, the state purposefully exterminated national cultural artifacts—journals, books, art and sculpture, burying human ideas which have never been and will never be consummated The purpose was to explain how the elimination of most prominent Ukrainian intellectuals was organized, rationalized and politicized During the period of one decade, the terror tore a hole in the fabric of Ukrainian culture that may never be mended

Spatial dimensions of Soviet repressions in the 1930s : the House of Writers (Kharkiv, Ukraine)

This thesis contributes to the growing scholarly interest in connections with Australia’s past through localised, individual stories. While much of this scholarship has focused on literature and the writings of cultural historians, this thesis concentrates on ways of visually recovering the memory of historical figures in relation to land through examining a unique form of portraiture which I have termed ‘imagined’.
The concept of imagined portraiture is distinguished from more conventional modes of portraiture using analyses of traditional portraiture by Richard Brilliant, Omar Calabrese and Catherine Soussloff. Imagined portraits, as I have defined them in my thesis, result from a temporal separation between subject and artist and involve a high degree of projection of the artist’s self in portraying the absent subject. In contrast to naturalistic posthumous portraits which suppress the artist’s identity as maker of the image to preserve external likeness, imagined portraits reflect the persona of the artist as much as the subject of the portrait.
This thesis is structured around imagined portraits by five Australian artists: Sidney Nolan’s paintings of Ned Kelly, John Lendis’s paintings of Lady Jane Franklin, Anne Ferran’s photographic portrayals of female convicts, Leah King-Smith’s photo-compositions of Victorian Aboriginal people, and Julie Dowling’s paintings of her ancestors. In all of the artworks under consideration person and place are intimately bound and inseparably recalled. Land is central to the identity of the subjects, but it is also important to each artist’s own relationship between self and place.The artists studied in this thesis bond with historical figures to connect with Australia’s past and form, or repair, meaningful attachments to the land. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I draw on the theoretical writings of philosophers Edward Casey and Jeff Malpas, historian Peter Read and feminist scholar on race and gender issues bell hooks to contend that knowledge of the past is critical to constructions of place and identity.
Due to the imaginative nature of the portrayal of the figures and the fusion with land, many of the featured artworks have not previously been considered portraits. Doing so enables a fresh perspective which highlights that an individual who actually existed lies at the core of each image. I argue that this is crucial to the artwork’s capacity to arouse empathy with current-day viewers – something that is underscored by theorists of historical fiction, such as Herbert Butterfield, Georg Lukacs and Jerome de Groot.
The historical subjects portrayed in this thesis are outsiders, many of whom have a troubled place in mainstream Australian history. Imagined portraits activate remembrance of these figures. They can contribute to the memory of those already mythicised, or recover individuals who were previously marginalised or excluded from Australian history. The imagined portraits featured in this thesis expose historical myths, gaps and silences while providing meaningful ways to connect with the past and negotiate displacement.

C. E. Emmer

Papers

Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps