Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
representation that are of relevance to both painting and computer-based landscape visual-
ization and GIS. The decision of what to represent and how to represent it is faced in both
disciplines. Rather than expect to find a comfortable common ground, the intention was to
share common experiences with a view to possibly offering new perspectives on our own
practices. This engagement has had a number of outcomes to date including;
'Hawley Square' (Hampson and Priestnall, 2001) paired five artists with five geographers
around themes of representation, focussing on Margate in Kent, England, culminating in
an exhibition, CD, symposium and web site.
'Real World Mapping' investigated techniques for capturing and re-presenting informa-
tion about an inner city neighbourhood to derive a collective 'vision' of a place from local
residents to contribute to the planning of regeneration schemes by the local authority.
The recently completed Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project
'Representations of Embodiment' continued to explore these issues through the develop-
ment of collaborative working practices which allowed the authors to approach these chal-
lenges in new ways. The challenge was to consider the ways a landscape can be represented
as it is experienced through a range of encounters with data as well as with the landscape
itself, using Chat Moss in Lancashire as the case study site.
12.5 The Chat Moss case study
A challenge facing both fine art and GIScience is to represent landscapes as they are expe-
rienced through the complexity of direct and indirect encounters; i.e. the understanding
that comes from being in the landscape bodily and the understanding that comes through
less immediate encounters, for example when we imagine a landscape through reading,
thinking, or looking at photographs.
The general aim of the project 'Representations of Embodiment: Implications for Fine
Art and Geographical Information Science' was to create and analyse an art work which
embodied such complexity and to explore the implications for GIScience. The method
we employed to do this was to collaboratively focus on a specific case study site, Chat
Moss in Lancashire, and to work towards creating an artwork that would incorporate data
representations of the site from a variety of sources, and then to analyse the process through
which this data contributed to the site's representation in the final artwork - in this case a
ceiling painting.
Chat Moss in Lancashire (pictured in Figure 12.3), is a non-picturesque landscape be-
tween Manchester and Liverpool, dominated by a peat bog and once the site of a signif-
icant engineering endeavour to route the first passenger railway across the landscape in
the early nineteenth century. Many of the outputs from the project, including the web site
(www.chatmoss.co.uk), the exhibition, and the accompanying publication, are named 'Chat
Moss' to reflect the geographical focus of the project.
During the development of the work, the nature of the collaboration proved hugely
effective in engaging both Priestnall and Hampson in research questions centred around
issues of the nature of data, geographic data representation, and methodologies for their
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