| Decoy, 2001, is a series of short digital animations presented on plasma screens that have been hung on the wall like paintings. Each sequence shows a photograph of an idyllic English landscape succumbing to digital effects. Computer-generated elements appear in the scene, sometimes under the cover of artificial fog, sometimes simply “out of the blue”: lakes are filled in to become fields; rows of trees pop into existence; an oak tree vanishes only to be replaced by a wireframe version that “grows” in its place. |  |
Green and Pleasant Land – David Barrett
Decoy, 2001, is a series of short digital animations presented on plasma screens that have been hung on the wall like paintings. Each sequence shows a photograph of an idyllic English landscape succumbing to digital effects. Computer-generated elements appear in the scene, sometimes under the cover of artificial fog, sometimes simply “out of the blue”: lakes are filled in to become fields; rows of trees pop into existence; an oak tree vanishes only to be replaced by a wireframe version that “grows” in its place.
The photographs Jane Prophet uses as the starting points have been taken from the photographic archive of the National Trust, the heritage and conservation charity that protects buildings, gardens and landscapes of special interest within England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Thus the photographs depict landscapes that contemporary English culture understands and promotes as its ideal natural environment.
You might suppose, therefore, that the animations are concerned with natural landscapes being tainted by intruding artificiality. However, such a view would assume that the original photographs depict “wild” and “natural” scenes.
In fact, the National Trust’s photographs have been taken from specific positions from which the landscapes were actually constructed to be viewed. Yes, “constructed.” These landscapes are not in any way natural, but are in fact decorative gardens. They are not decorative in the formal, Versailles tradition. Rather they are part of an 18th century trend known as the Landscape Movement. Within this, designers such as Humphry Repton and Lancelot “Capability” Brown strove to change their patrons’ land from working terrain or formal gardens into informal landscapes capable of providing naturalistic vistas. These views would mimic the compositional devices of the great 17th century landscape paintings—such as those by the French artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin—that were being brought back at the time by members of the British aristocracy who had taken the Grand Tour of Western Europe.
The resulting idealized landscapes were created through truly massive revisions. Formal gardens, trees and buildings were ruthlessly cleared, whole villages demolished and rebuilt out of sight, tens of thousands of trees were planted to hide neighbouring land, lakes were excavated, the sides of hills cut away—all in the quest for pleasing vistas. By devoting vast tracts of land to aesthetic ends rather than working fields, landowners were making spectacular displays of their wealth; they had all this income-generating land, but chose not to work it.
It was a conscious decision to show the land as “naturalistic” rather than formal or agricultural, but it was no less carefully cultivated. And yet, over time, these constructed landscapes were accepted as emblematic of the English landscape, to the point that the National Trust photographs have come to represent the popular vision of the English natural landscape.
Prophet tackles this popular vision by overlaying onto these photographs wireframe models: the animations fill in the excavated lakes and sprout trees in the digitally restored land. Wireframe computer modelling is usually employed to create the structure of an object before any surface textures are added, so Prophet’s use of this technique implies that she is unearthing the previous structure—the previous views—that existed before the God-like gardeners arrived to transform the landscape.
If Decoy is about constructed landscapes ordered around aesthetic and wealth-displaying principles, the Blot series of 2003 focuses on constructed landscapes that are the result of industrial considerations. The mile-long Corus steelworks at Port Talbot, Wales, for instance, is seen across a wide lake that is in fact another facet of the plant’s structure, just like the chimney stacks and foundries; the lake is an artificial construction whose purpose is to cool the pipes that lie beneath its surface. Similarly, the vast industrial plant at Lac des Arcs in Canada has been photographed by Prophet from the far side of its own frozen lake. This facility is the Lafarge Exshaw plant, a limestone quarry grinding up the Rocky Mountains to extract lime for concrete production. In both Blot and Decoy the selection of the view to be worked over is just as important as the wireframe additions; it is these specific views that the works draw much of their meaning from—they are loaded scenes.
While the two works function in similar ways, the Blot series suggests a step on from Decoy. The term “blot” refers to the phrase “blot on the landscape,” as if these sites are somehow disfiguring the “natural” landscape, but it also refers to the familiar Rorschach blot test used by psychiatrists. This reference suggests that our experience of the views is somehow relative; a certain component of looking involves seeing your own mind. Not only does this provoke us to question our own responses to seeing these landscapes, but it also emphasises how much of our experience of the environment is based on our own, internal factors. And if—to a certain extent—we see what we want to see, then our senses can be more easily deceived. This is what simulation and representation rely upon.
Prophet is interested in simulations of nature and, in particular, mathematical abstractions that mimic natural processes (this was nowhere more apparent than in her large-scale digital work, TechnoSphere). One particular investigation that she has more recently been involved with—as seen in Decoy and Blot—is the mathematical modelling of tree growth. Following this has been an investigation into how convincing other forms of modelling can be, resulting in the 2005 work, Model Landscapes. Here, a series of shelves display tableaux of model trees constructed from different media: one is constructed out of wire; one is a low-grade reproduction from a book on Capability Brown; one is produced by sending computer-generated, 3D models to a rapid-prototyping machine; one is cut from the pages of a theory book; one is made up of natural leaf skeletons. Each shelf has a small camera attached, pointing at the trees and relaying a live feed through to a tiny, LCD monitor. The resulting, heavily mediated images appear more or less convincing as landscapes. The point is that, as viewers, we can convince ourselves that these landscapes are somehow real, especially when our experiences of physical landscapes are filtered through the insidious visions of idyllic, untouched nature that we store as cultural memories. Even Oscar Wilde understood this; in The Decay of Lying, 1891, he mischievously described how nature imitates art by producing effects that we are only aware of because we have seen them in paintings. Such cultural images from the collective consciousness taint any possibility we might ever have of experiencing Arthur Schopenhauer’s definition of the sublime: apprehending truly wild, uncultured nature, and finding that we are subsumed within it.
Nature isn’t always natural. That’s the central truth that Prophet explores in her work. Nature, as Westerners experience it, is constructed; the landscape is determined as much by human intervention as by natural forces. The vistas we so often admire are the remnants of social or economic power, and as much as they may be enjoyed, they can also be read and understood.
For all the history behind this issue, it is made more urgent now through the rise of computer technology and advances in the modelling of virtual landscapes. It is possible to produce convincing immersive worlds by combining 3D-modelling software developed through military flight-simulation research with Chaos Theory’s fractal geometry, and then using the Internet to connect remote users. This makes the question of how real a landscape is—and what meaning it may have—incredibly significant. At the time of writing, there are over 12 million active subscribers to Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and half of those are subscribed to one particular game. This means that six million people inhabit a single virtual world on a regular basis, giving it about the same population as, say, Switzerland, Israel or Paraguay.
While critics of such worlds may point to the fact that they are artificial, and that exploring them produces nothing but pre-rendered “discoveries,” Prophet makes it clear that this can also be applied to the real world. Her virtual excavations highlight the fact that many landscapes are effectively theme parks, where viewers are led, almost on rails, through a series of fixed viewing points designed to privilege the viewer and to imply control over the visible world. The nostalgia industry’s presentation of these landscapes as natural idylls is undermined by Prophet’s probings as she makes it clear that, far from a simple, green and pleasant land, the landscape is a constructed, discursive space whose meaning is to be fought for.
