Actors in the Landscape of Communication Experience and Categories of Space in Web-Based Visualization of Landscapes for Landscape Planning Communication

This paper focuses on spatial experience and spatial categories in web-based 3Dvisualisation with special reference to current strategies for landscape planning communication. Historically, notions of landscape are inseparable from pictorial art and media, and the point made in this piece is that that also web-media may influence significantly the way we perceive landscapes. A popular categorical distinction in modern landscape politics and criticism is that of “land” versus “landscape”, i.e. the “land” of everyday-life and professional use versus the landscape as experienced by the more or less external “observer”; perhaps even the ideological “landscaping”, or “pictorialization” of landscapes. French urban planner and philosopher, Paul Virilio, has recently taken up this dichotomy under the heading of “landscapes of events”, asserting that “today’s landscapes” are loosing their dimension of everyday events, and that the “land” (the culturally vivid land) in this sense therefore is vanishing into “landscapes”, into images. Setting off from this perspective, the paper reformulates the land/landscape dichotomy in terms of taking interests in land-use via Internet-based visualization. An urgent question today is precisely whether current strategies for the politicization and taking interest in a future sustainable multi-use of the European agricultural landscapes might be realized by means of facilitating and encouraging such interests via the “Superhighway” of the Internet. This paper seeks to approach this possibility by discussing in detail what such “access” to landscape may imply in terms of the “land”/”landscape” dichotomy and the geographical concepts of space and place, which also seem relevant to discuss in this connection. Moreover does the paper seek to discover what landscape planning communication in these terms may be conceived of. Following a reading of French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s “Practice of Everyday Life” in terms of Internet “surfing”, the paper compares spatial experience in web-surfing with the traditional landscape and visualization categories of spatial experience. In this manner the article leads to an experimental distinction of separate levels of space in some dominant applications for web-based landscape visualization of today (i.e. interactive panorama, 3D models, 3D Multi-User Domains, live web-cams, animations, stills, etc.). This distinction appears quite similar to our categories of interactivity (suggesting a continuum of still higher degrees of interactive “freedom” as concerns choice of point of view in a virtual 3D-environment), but consists in fact of discrete levels of one-dimensional space, or “routes” for web-surfing. Accordingly, this distinction might provide a sustainable theoretical foundation for a classification of interactivity in applications and designs for web-based 3D-visualization of landscapes.