BENJAMIN EDWARDS  WRITINGS   To the Convenient Landscape and Back: The Effects of Mobility, 1997 
I. Expansion    II. The Rational Services The Romantic    III. Resistance is Futile    IV. Taxonomy, Classification, Analysis    V. Thematics    VI. Collapse    VII. The Welcome      Bibliography

The Rational Services The Romantic

Over the past several decades, the landscape has been transformed by the spatial logic and needs of the automobile, a technological laxative which has leveled the verticality of cities and eliminated the very distinction of the suburb. (Boyer, p.47) Development has a natural tendency to expand and to consume space unless it is checked by technological or economic limitations. These chains of convenience have been elasticized, first, by the freedom of mobility, and second, by the automobile’s universalization. Spatial rigidity has been relaxed by tenfold: the brittleness of pedestrian mobility and its human-scale architecture and system of signs has given way to the fluidity of automobile circulation and its architecture of elongation. The traditional notion of a fixed center has been run through a prism, shattered and scattered, fragmented, multiplied, and diffused. The once spatially fixed subject is now the fluid and omnipresent consumer.
A distribution of points, of residence, production, consumption, has submitted to the strands of betweenness which connect them, not silky smooth conduits, but lined with hooks and distractions, like television, a medium for advertising, a funnel through pure consumption space. Travel through this space is cinematic, speed generating the projector: the colors, shapes, and images of signs, architecture, and billboards wash over and through the viewer. Through the frame of the windshield, landscapes, vistas, geometric compositions, and narratives unfold, approach, reach optimal visual display, then speed to peripheral view and recede into the rearview mirror to make way for the next presentation. The driver is a passive receiver, a screen onto which visuals are projected. Marshall McLuhan’s observation of television applies equally to the betweenness of the landscape: "In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point." (McLuhan, p.125)
Betweenness is the space of waiting, and as unused transitional space it is private-- the meditative drift of the drive, the momentary reflection on nothing in particular while pumping gas, the line, the elevator, the airport lounge. But this emptiness is fertile ground for the commercial devices of distraction which colonize, occupy, and supplant privacy and visual silence. Betweenness has superseded its function as simply a means of transport and transition, and has become dominant as a condition, advertising products and services, but even more so, advertising itself, advertising the romance and freedom of the perpetual relay. While the convenient landscape facilitates mobility, it is so loaded, saturated with conveniences, that a barrage of attempts are made to lure the driver away, but with promises of a fast and easy return. YOU are made to feel welcome, which creates the insincere super-welcome. The purpose of the barrage is not to provide, but to beckon and solicit, to suck. Saturation of advertising produces the numb consumer, who becomes callous, cynical, skeptical, and distrustful. Like an immune system which is fortified through continued exposure to germs, the consumer is anesthetized, escalating the lures to the even more outlandish, garish, and ridiculous. The ideal, unworn consumer would remain endlessly in limbo, perpetually distracted in the escape of anticipation.
The auto-bubble is the carriage of betweenness: it mediates the individual and the landscape, provides the theater, dictates the language and understanding of space. Being inside the automobile is similar to what it might feel like to be inside yourself, the physical body removed from consciousness and observable as merely an apparatus. The windshield is the visual organ, a window to the soul, the console regulates temperature and comfort level, the wheel provides motor coordination... the automobile is a technological extension of the human body, a prosthesis with which to equip oneself, providing speed, protection, and comfort, against the forces of nature and the insecurity of the outside world. More than just personalized, mobile architecture, the driver and the automobile merge to form a cybernetic being, the auto. (McLuhan, p.31-2)
The auto does not really experience but reads, scans, identifies, processes, accesses, and registers, because it is completely linear and teleological. Green signs provide directional information; blue indicates rest areas; orange equals caution; white and yellow lines dictate rules, boundaries, and parameters; a low fuel gauge prompts a search for the next gas station; a yellow M connects with a desire for french fries. When not actively engaged in reading the landscape for the purposes of maintaining flow, the auto is more relaxed and absorbent, allowing the liquidity of betweenness to seep into its pores.
Speed is the force which binds driver and machine: at high speeds they are one, completely aligned, but as velocity decreases, the human dislocates from its mechanical extension; at a standstill, the automobile is a static shell, merely a barrier. The scale-shift experience of a sudden, unexpected traffic jam which momentarily interrupts movement is jarring, disorienting, and strange. The linear becomes the spatial, the elongation of road markings becomes apparent- the environment, previously read, is now experienced aesthetically. Details appear, irregularities and nuances become visible, road signs are suddenly very large and tactile, trash is noticed in the grassy median... the intricacies and residue of the flow.
The landscape has been subdued and fitted with the accoutrements of auto-convenience as well, adapted and prostheticized through a seemingly infinite array of relay stations to service and to interface with the auto. (Halley, p.127-30) It is not possible to experience the landscape without experiencing the road, the gas station, and the fast food restaurant. The road and its stations are technological grafts which frame and define the landscape; they form the language through which we understand nature. The window of the Romantic landscape painting was the medium and frame of the nineteenth century: through it nature was infinite, majestic, awe-inspiring, sublime. The Romantic landscape represented the sublime through the individual's awe and submission to the greater power of the infinite. In Casper David Friedrich's paintings, the viewer identifies with the insignificance of the lone figure, who is crushed by the force of the vast unknown in spiritual and transcendental servitude to nature. The intellectual model for the Romantic sublime was Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757, in which it is defined as "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling," excited by situations of awe, terror, horror, and fear, where the true pain of life-threatening danger is removed, and aestheticized into delight. Its sources included such categories as Power, Vastness, Infinity, and Succession and Uniformity, which composed the Artificial Infinite. According to Burke, "the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror." (Burke, p.57)
Through the Industrial Revolution to the Global Village, the infinitude of nature has been lost and replaced by the infinitude of its technological extensions. Cole and Bierstadt documented the effects of this turning of the tide on the American landscape: their sublime was of mythologized wonder and majesty, and of nostalgic mourning, rather than of terror and fear.
The origin of the sublime has undergone a reversal, not to be awakened by "nature," which is shrinking, but by the expanding Artificial Infinite, in Succession and Uniformity, of its prosthetic extensions and their physical manifestation as the landscape of consumer culture. Today, the consumer faces the sublime of convenience with a mixture of astonishment, fascination, disgust, magnificence, terror, awe, nostalgia, seduction, and repulsion, a contradictory and confused passion, like Burke's, of delight and fear.