Modeling the English Landscape: gardening, the picturesque and the  technological sublime.

Over the last 10 years, working in collaboration with Gordon Selley, I have made art works that use artificial life programmes and fractal modeling to explore and challenge ideas about 'the natural' (in terms of both the body and landscape). TechnoSphere (www.technosphere.org.uk) made in 1995 with Gordon Selley  is an alife world in which creatures engage with one another and email the human users that created them. Our users responses to this work say much about  the shift in ideas about  'Nature" and 'The artificial'. This project also runs in realtime 3D at The National Musuem of Photography Film and TV, in Bradford, UK.

More recent works, such as Decoy made  with Gordon Selley  in 2001 use fractal mathematics to model idealised English Landscapes. Decoy is a screen based digital work reflecting on the politics of landscape, construction and ownership.

Drawing on works by painters such as Gainsborough and Poussin as well as the creations of landscape designers Humphrey Repton and 'Capability' Brown, Decoy consists of a series of animated digital 'paintings', displayed on plasma-screens, in which subtly evolving fractal landscapes are combined with photographic images of the views of the grounds of various  country houses. This quintessentially English, Arcadian vista has entered the popular imagination as an embodiment of Nature and the Natural, yet it is almost entirely artificial in its construction. By combining these vistas with evolving simulated landscapes, Decoy unearths the artificiality of each landscape's past, either by returning the setting to a closer approximation of 'wild' nature, or by allowing the viewer to project ahead into the future, according to different growth and planting patterns.

I am interested in drawing connections between the painters and landscape gardeners of the 18th century and contemporary art and simulation, looking in particular at the use of the human body (viewer) in the landscape.  The use of the human figure to determine a 'privileged viewing position' (or what w might also describe as using the human figure to define the viewing frustum of an actual landscaped parkland) is central to 18th century landscaping. The human body is also used as a 'measure' for scale when thinking of scale (to determine the sublime). During the aesthetic computing event I would like to  show some of the works cited above and discuss a different definition of the sublime, drawing on fractal mathematics and current trends in biotechnology to debate a shift in our understanding of (human) scale.