Layers of Data: The Processed Landscape

REDUCTIONS OF A LANDSCAPE

Mixed Media Collage on Data and Information

Layers of a Data-Processed Landscape, 2025. Printed media collage, 11.5 x 12".

The reductions of a landscape can be used to harness information and represent it with data. Data of something like an acreage of land can bring insight about the physical world, but it inherently dismisses other data. Science filters information to make sense of it, but can strip the reality and experience of it.

Layers of Abstracted Experience

There are many methods to represent a landscape. This collage explore several ways people in society process data from an environment into something measurable and easier to understand. These four are listed by increasing abstraction.

1. Visual- The photograph best demonstrates the way we use tools such as image-capture or drawing to replicate the impression of a landscape, although often cropped and restricted by perspective. This attempts to imitate the experience of optical input.
   

2. Platonic- The landscape is reduced to a linear plane or other geometric rules of cartography. Maps of the world show how people can interpret an imperfect and organic landscape into a calculated and reductive abstraction. The utility of the abstraction becomes a strength, removing 'irrelevant' detail for the sake of practicality and readability (although inherently fallible in two dimensions). Even the most detailed maps like Google Earth are still mapped to a geometric sphere and are nonetheless reduced to pixels and bits, without perfect geographic exactness. The visceral scene of a landscape still includes smells and sounds among other experiences, of which these maps do not have the faculty to present.
   

3. Data- The ones and zeros, the pure binary data that composes generated maps or simulated environments becomes elaborated databases of information. It is a language, and coded translation of an environment or landscape, interpreted for computation. The cloud-based computing and LLM's can access troves of information, and that data is processed to present new derivative information, all abstractions of the original subject matter. This Data-processing is a further abstraction, as concepts of data-analysis allow for new digitized maps that present the data about those 'landscapes' as easily-readable, visual information. Analysis of population density, meteorology and weather tacking, city planning and engineering... however the data is organized to present a visual representation, it becomes an alternate language we think with when interacting with the landscape. We see roads as lines on a GPS map, our power consumption as a node on an electrical power grid, our identities as a credit score, our home under a blob with 40% chance of scattered showers.
   

4. Meta-data- Beyond our ability to understand and process ourselves, the algorithms and mathematical computations of powerful computers and LLM's have surpassed the human capability of calculation. This expanse of data is explained by patterns that are too abstract to visualize, it can be the quantum mechanical explanations of matter, time and space itself. It reduces a landscape so that a 'place' can be a chat room in VR, a nowhere and anywhere. Perhaps it is the matrix, an illusion or meta-reality... does it transform the landscape into something altogether abstracted from the real experience of the thing itself? The definitions and language of a landscape has become just that, a word, an abstracted concept without any real consideration for the experience.

   
   

There are many ways we have abstracted and reduced our environment to better gain a grasp of and understand it... and at times it has been beneficial. The danger is in taking the abstractions as the reality itself and forgetting that the information we use to process our environment is not the experience, which is worthy of consideration since there is no landscape without an observer.

This collage has no way of truly representing a landscape, unless it was literally integrated into the land itself, such as many artist have made like Earthworks. And so, it must also succumb to the fact that it is all an abstraction, but one that hopefully brings insight.