Manaugh, Geoff. Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions

Pap. Actar. 2012

Book ID: 91708

Ground-penetrating radar used to map buried cities. Ghost tectonic plates subsiding beneath the American West, revealed by seismic tomography. Lensless cameras that measure WiFi networks to see through walls. Laser-jamming dazzle devices. Retroreflective prisms on the moon. These and other instruments reveal the strange and often unexpected landscapes invisibly present all around us.

Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, edited by Geoff Manaugh, based on his exhibition of the same name at the Nevada Museum of Art, explores the future of landscape studies by way of the technical intermediaries the instruments, devices and architectural inventions through which humans have come to understand the built and natural environments.

From autonomous tools for remote archaeology to radio telescopes scanning electromagnetic events in space, by way of colorful mechanisms allowing children to experience the animal superpowers of other species, Landscape Futures looks at the world of extraordinary scientific machines and their hypothetical alternatives that filter, augment, clarify, and transformatively reproduce the world they survey.

Featuring exclusive work specially commissioned for Landscape Futures including ambitious new pieces by architects Smout Allen, David Gissen, Chris Woebken & Kenichi Okada, Liam Young, Lateral Office, and The Living this book also brings together a series of essays, short stories, and provocative new research agendas by such writers as Sam Jacob, Alexander Trevi, Jan Zalasiewicz, Scott Geiger, James R. Fleming, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse, and Rob Holmes. The result is much more than a catalog of projects past. This book, instead, is a manual for invention, a DIY spur for future workshops, courses, exhibitions, and essays for new instruments and spatial devices both practical and imaginative, informed as much by speculative archaeology as by geological narratives of an Earth yet to come.

Land art in Nevada is like jazz in New Orleans. When it comes to landscape futurism, this planet has no guide and seer like Geoff Manaugh. Bruce Sterling

232 pp.