Ross Gibson's blog

Another simple but profound moment from the research in the 'Iconic Landscapes' project.  We asked people to describe the definitive characteristics of their environment in just one word.

Here's what came of it: http://iconiclandscapes.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/nature-in-a-word-image-...

The nature of a place that people choose to inhabit  -- they way these people understand the place is entirely cultural, and usually impelled by positive emotions of attachment, of placement.

For the past year, at the University of Sydney, I've been involved in a splendid inter-disciplinary project called 'Iconic Landscapes', which has examined three different research zones, to understand not only the ecological intricacies of the regions but also the extent to which different groups of 'stakeholders'  care about the regions and try to protect, promote or impede the vibrancy of knowledge arising from each region.  

The regions: Central Australian Desert and Channel Country; NSW western grazing lands; Sydney Harbour sea-walls.  

Attached is a tiny video file (a bit cruddy) of an animation that I commissioned along with collaborator Kate Richards (consulting also with Tony MacGregor). It was put together in tandem with by a Paddington company called PXL.

Gorgeous in its original BIG 250 meg file, this little movie is a taster for our dream of a relational database that can be raised and animated out of a social-media map.

I wrote this short piece about ten years ago, for a book about INFRASTRUCTURE. I was worried at the time (still am!) about how the full connectedness of country was not being served by our modern regimes of administration. The editors asked for 400 words. The issue was so big and the time was so short that I decided I might as well swing hard and 'get some runs or get out', as they say in country cricket.

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UNCOMMON COUNTRY

I'm a Partner Investigator on a Linkage Project with RMIT and Parks Victoria. Based in Wilson's Prom, the project is investigating whether Social Media can be useful in the acquiring, storing and communicating the tacit knowledge that Park Rangers and regular visitors all hold in their quiet devotion to the place. On the last visit to the Prom, talking with the prodigiously knowledgeable Parks folks, I was struck by how there's the possibility of a loosely organised, ritualised body of COMMUNAL knowledge. No one person knows everything.

"Let me hope the whole of that landscape we shall essay to travel in is visible and may be known as there all at once; let this be borne in mind, in order that, when we descend among its windings and blockades, into examination of slender particulars, this its wholeness and simultaneous living map may not be neglected, however lost the breadth of the country may be in the winding walk of each sentence."

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
first published 1941, reprinted London:
Picador Classic, 1988, p.111.

Over the past year, I've been involved in the Affective Atlas project by RMIT. We've travelled all over the remarkable country, met people, conceptualised artworks and texts that will be exhibited across Victoria in 2010. We've found all kinds of assets and sentiments invested across this country that Thomas Mitchell called 'Australia Felix' and that indigenous people have settled and engineered for thousands of years.

Here's the basic blurb:

Summary

Some folks at RMIT, coming at the topic principally from a perspective encompassing design and architecture, are working in a similar way. This is the research project that they've dubbed "The Affective Atlas". They are working mainly in the environs of the Western District of Victoria. Here's a link to one their first papers about the project:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2350g48l7655714/

The team includes Harriet Edquist, William Cartwright, Adrian Miles, Brian Morris, Laurene Vaughan and Jeremy Yuille.

This is an essay of mine, dating back to the early 1990s. I recently went back to it, to think again about the way storytelling puts meanings and feelings into places. In the most literal sense, storytelling is a process of 'enchantment' -- singing, saying, writing, chanting significance into a place.

The essay was first published in WORLD LITERATURE TODAY in 1993. An expanded version (the one that you can read in the attachment) then appeared in a book edited by Tony Barta, Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, London: Praeger, 1998.

With an interdisciplinary team of scholars from the sciences and the humanities at The University of Sydney, I'm involved in the early phases of a project examining ecological resilience, the development of meaning and feelings of affiliation in three 'Iconic Landscapes'. Here's the blurb.

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ECOLOGICAL RESILIENCE OF PEOPLE AND PLACE: THE KEY TO SUSTAINING AUSTRALIA’S ICONIC LANDSCAPES

WHAT?