Exploring Landscape, Documenting Culture, Constructing Memory: The Loire Valley Internet Workshop
نویسندگان
چکیده
In 1998 a 260-kilometer stretch of the newness of UNESCO's 'cultural landscape' classification, and concerns about nuclear power generation along the river, this nomination stalled in the international committee. French officials turned to digital media as a way of explaining the merits of their nomination, and as an aid for coordinating nlultiple agencies' efforts in plans for the region's future. Figure 1 : The Val de Loire web site home page For one extended week in July 2000 a small group of skilled volunteers descended upon the Loire Valley to record, narrate, and interpret its history. With the worldwide web as a unifying instrument of expression, the interdisciplinary team of twenty some students, teachers, professionals, and government officials was charged with modeling a clear and sustainable vehicle for cultural memory. What transpired is a story of landscape exploration and i c h i m 01 C U L T U R A L H E R I T A G E a n d T F C H N O L O G I E S ~n t h e T H I R D M I L L E N N I U M cultural documentation in the age of the internet. LAND AND LIFE The classical definition of 'landscape', in a day when artists like J.M.W. Turner and Eugene Delacroix journeyed to the Loire Valley to train their gazes on its terrestrial and atmospheric splendors, was a vista of rural country composed as a picture. Even landscape designers had begun to take their cues from painting, constructing parks and gardens that embodied aesthetic principles of an idealized pictorial landscape. Although English language dictionaries still offer the old-fashioned formulation of landscape as "an expanse of the earth's surface that can be seen from a single viewpoint," the perspectives of geography and environmental science have transformed our sense of this terrain. The disappearance of wilderness and the depletion of natural resources have become matters of fact. The modern concept of landscape is no longer a pretty picture of unspoiled scenery, and it is never simply a natural site. Rather it refers to a space that has been defined, ordered, and fulfilled by human habitation. Geography, for better or worse, is anthropocentric. A landscape is "a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature," wrote J.B. Jackson. "It represents man taking upon himself the role of time" [I]. To form an idea of a landscape is not merely to behold a view or to catalog its component features, but to perceive a system of dynamic interrelationship among its elements, as Carl Sauer insisted-"to comprehend land and life in terms of each other" [2]. The World Heritage Convention, adopted by UNESCO in 1972, established an international legal instrument for recognizing and protecting sites of outstanding cultural or natural value. In the original writing, this Convention did not include the word 'landscape'. Yet for purposes of practical implementation, its authors' careful distinction between natural and cultural properties posed a paradox: many sites that seemed worthy of inscription in the List failed to strictly match criteria of one category or the other. While a handful of sites were approved under the designation of 'mixed property', it was not until 1992 that the World Heritage Committee officially introduced a new provision fur acknowledging sites that are distinguished by the reciprocal actions of nature and man. According to this provision, a 'cultural landscape' is a site which embodies "the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influcncc of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment, and of successive social, economic and cultural forces, both external and internal" [3]. Figure 2 The UNESCO section of the web site The Loire VaIley, nominated in 1998 for inscription in the World Heritage List as a living cultural landscape, exemplifies
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