Landscapes Without Memory

  • Joan Fontcuberta
Aperture Foundation: 2005. 96 pp. £22, $40 1931788790 | ISBN: 1-931-78879-0

At first glance, Joan Fontcuberta's book of simulated landscapes looks like a straightforward attempt to extract a glossy coffee-table product from the marriage of science and art. Its padded cover, high-quality colour and landscape format add to the impression of indulgent luxury.

But it seems that the author's aim (if not, perhaps, the publisher's) is more postmodern. The ‘art book’ market seems to be the very arena that Fontcuberta, a Spanish artist and interpreter of the photographic image, wants at some level to challenge. The result is a perplexingly contradictory work — yet one that I think contains, whether intentionally or not, a potentially important message about visual representation in science.

This gallery of virtual landscapes has been generated by a fractal-based software package called Terragen, a tool used for turning maps into three-dimensional images that was originally developed for scientific and military applications. Fontcuberta has subverted Terragen's purpose by feeding it ‘false’ data — not maps at all, but paintings of landscapes by famous artists and photos of his own body. By doing so, he demonstrates that Terragen can make a mountain out of anything (and will typically put a lake in the middle).

He points out that, although Terragen's advocates celebrate its ‘realism’ and its ability to capture the beauty of nature, running the program on the default settings gives a result that “tends to come very close to the kitsch of picture postcards”. This is amply demonstrated in the book; indeed, in his introductory commentary, art historian Geoffrey Batchen speaks of the “relentless, banal, undemanding repetition of pictorial clichés” evident in these images, calling them “terrible in the way they give themselves up so easily to the demands of communal taste”. In other words, he admits that, as art books go, this one is awful. And yet it is surely communal taste that will sell the book, whose readers may skip the text and simply bask in the ‘beautiful’ scenes that a computer has constructed from the raw pixels of paintings by Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, André Derain and others.

A cultural landscape: the images produced by Terragen (top) have the kitsch quality of the Romantic paintings of Frederic Edwin Church (below). Credit: G. CLEMENTS/CORBIS

Does Fontcuberta acknowledge this paradox himself? He hints, but doesn't quite come out with it. “Postmodernism, the society of the spectacle, the capitalism of fiction and this age of melancholy,” he writes, have combined to consolidate “a mistrust of a reality composed of simulations, manifested in an avalanche of seductive, saccharine images — to which it is imperative that we respond critically.” Is this an invitation to react with aesthetic horror to his pictures, to the way in which Terragen has turned great art (or biology) into a bland, kitsch vision of the Sublime? Or is he just hedging?

I think, however, that he may be identifying something more important than the mere fact that the computer geeks who created Terragen, probably weaned on bad sci-fi art, have imbued their program with terrible taste. (Actually there is something rather enjoyable in letting your intuition interpolate between the ‘map’ and the Terragenized representation, noting how the colours and textures of Wassily Kandinsky and Thomas Gainsborough have been transmuted into these rugged slopes and brumal skies.)

The fact is that we have seen these landscapes before. Terragen has turned Braque's The Fields into something resembling Saturn's moon Titan, as recently unmasked by the Huygens probe, with its tawny skies reflected in petroleum lakes among ice-covered hills. Piet Mondrian's The Grey Tree has become red and barren Mars, and the heavy skies and golden peaks produced from Rothko are Venus as seen by the Magellan mission. It's a stark reminder that what NASA (or increasingly, as in Titan's case, an online army of sophisticated amateur graphics experts) is feeding us are visions of other worlds fed through a very particular stylistic filter.

In other words, these computer-generated images from space missions come laden with cultural baggage. The methods for generating these pictures from raw data have been imbued with what is probably a largely subconscious bias about how a landscape should look. And it is not hard to discern the origin of that bias. Unquestionably, as Batchen points out, much of it stems from the German Romantics, particularly Caspar David Friedrich (whose Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog was, appropriately, Fontcuberta's first victim). But the form that this aesthetic takes in Terragen's creations is most clearly reminiscent of the American Romantics such as Thomas Cole (who was deeply influenced by Alexander von Humboldt's descriptions of the Andes) and his student Frederic Edwin Church. For generations of Americans, Church's heightened (in all senses) landscapes were the way nature ‘really’ looked. That influence is clear in the planetary paintings that pre-date the current computer-generated versions, as well as in the vistas seen in any ‘space opera’ Hollywood movie.

But the influence of such artistic traditions on scientific imagery does not stop at real landscapes. Stock representations of the Sublime can also be discerned in company photographs of chemical plants soaring like tubular mountain ranges into coppery skies, and in the ‘atomic landscapes’ that can now be constructed from scanning probe microscopy. Even the interpretation of the periodic table recently produced by Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, with its crags thrusting out of a placid lake, has a Terragenic air.

More than 40 years ago, art historian Ernst Gombrich pointed out in his seminal book Art and Illusion (Pantheon, 1960) that no human depiction of the world (and this surely now includes photography) escapes our culturally acquired stereotyping. Maybe Fontcuberta's book will serve to remind scientists that the same applies to them too.