Labor Day Weekend Assignment: The Digiscape (in progress)

Over the past few days i have done quite a bit or research on the concept of landscape and how it has evolved through history. Through my research, i have created a list of notes for myself that is helping me create my personal digiscape:

Researching the landscape:

• Definition: "(1) all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. (2) the genre of landscape painting. (3) the distinctive features of a particular situation or intellectual activity."
• What determines those features?
• Aesthetics (color, form, space)
• meaning, relations to current social or political climate.
• personal imagination
  
• Natural Landscape vs. Pre-Meditated (Man Made) Landscape
• (Man Made) Base reference: "Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson
• Characterized by a desire to go and manipulate the landscape to suit personal interests, whatever they may be.
• American Landscape by Charles Sheeler
• More of a photographic reference. Style: "Precisionism." Based around desire to creat exact replication of what is seen.
• Asks interesting question: "When does the man made landscape for one becomes the natural landscape for another?"
• Representation of the landscape in alternate media
  
• What digital mediums are used to represent landscapes in this era?
• Video Games and Simulations
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• here, here, here, and here,
• highly detailed render of New York, adapted and slightly modified for the game's setting, "Liberty City."
• Super Mario Galaxy
• here, here, (video)here,
• exact opposite ethic to creating an environment. Purely imaginative, utilizing shifts in gravity and having environments created of many smaller systems networked together.
  
• Satellite Projections
• Google Earth
• here
• Used not only for mapping locations from any point in the world, but also as a tool for displaying the connections between one point of the world to another.
• Supports web 2.0 ideas with user creation.
• Google Sketchup
• here
• Allows user to create environments found on our earth and import them into google earth to help support a fully realized 3-D model of our earth, from landmass to building, etc.
• CAN create unique environments as well, serving as a tool for the creation of personalized environments.

Our digiscapes are left up to our imagination. The information researched has helped guide my thinking to consider the functions and aesthetics of landscapes created in the past. My latter examples may be commercial in nature but demonstrate the sheer possibility the digital realm gives us to express the landscapes we want to portray. Some of these environments are network-oriented and serve as spaces that we use to interact with other people for various reasons. Their landscapes can be (but are not limited by being) represented by lists of the individuals involved (i.e. youtube, facebook,) or by fully realized environments (World of Warcraft, Second Life.) Every new creation of digital content further expands the landscape we as a civilization has already established. Although it is not readily tangible, save a few keyboard or button presses, it is as much alive as anything we walk around in.

My finished digiscape will support some of the ideas i have expressed. I am still working on it as we speak, but i figured i would post what i have been thinking about as of late in regards to the assignment.