Kaeur Studio
31/03/2023
HTLAL?-series
RESEARCH
New Research Project 2023
How to look at landscapes? is the newest endeavor in the research work of Kaeur Studio.
by KAEUR STUDIO
Conceptualized as an assemblage of sources, links and works from different fields of academia and culture at the core, How to look at landscapes? is a new, experimental approach to ask questions about the intersection of identity, surrounding, and (digital) culture. The main focus is not to do our own research but to work as a facilitator, curating existing research and theories and linking it in un-common ways – without hierarchy, strictly interdisciplinary. What is the connection between the solitude discourse in Thoreau´s Walden and Minecraft? How does a land acknowledgment work for a digital, fictional space? Why are there obituaries for islands?
But the over-arching topic is the relation to identity, socialization, and collective and personal memory. How do we impact our surrounding and how does our surrounding impact us?
Further this endeavor does not understand digital and analog as a binary. We look at spaces and cultural phenomenas on both end of the spectrum and the in between.
The project will have output in form of a miro-board, a dedicated blog-series, and exhibitions and publications to come in the future.
How can we experience a landscape without any interference? Experiencing a landscape – especially nature or wilderness – is always a balance of minimizing the impact of one self’s presence and compromising on the perception or perspective. Landscapes also bear memories.
“We are situated in a digital wilderness which we are currently not able to fully understand due to a lack of vocabulary and the ever-changing nature of digital culture and the techno-discourse. While wildness was a product of a modernistic dynamics of creating an other to civilization, a digital wildness resembles an other created through data, immaterial spaces, algorithms and computing power – not per se un-civilized or non-civilized but civilized in a different way than the meat space, our physical reality. The social rules of digital interaction work partly differently to our common set of rules and standards because the immaterial realm has different requirements and develops different societal conventions.
To approach the other it is necessary to be aware of the construction of alterity, the hierarchy within and the limitations of interactions based on the definition of the other. A discussion of alterity is also a discussion of power. Derrida, who draws particularly on Levinas's philosophy, summarizes alterity as the "transition and outset to the other," as the most irreducible of (human) experience.
For both Derrida and Levinas, distance from the other/alien is the negotiating space of the defining power of duality. The possession, recognition, and apprehension of the other is described as an act of violence in the context of the exercise of power and the history of philosophy.
In the context of the digital wildness the other is a digital entity – the alterity discourse shifts into a post-human field.”
