Land

Ko Te Whenua: The Land By Martin Rumsby While landscape has played an important part in the history of New Zealand painting and sculpture, it has not featured so prominently in local films. Certainly, the land has provided a scenic backdrop for the feature film, advertising and tourist industries. Beyond that, with the exception of our moving image artists it has not been brought to the forefront by our industrial filmmakers. What began with European explorer culture as a process of documentation and classification later became a topographical mapping for the purpose of settlement, resource extraction, and agricultural production. This was done in a precise, empirical manner. Later, the New Zealand landscape became the setting for imported art models, at once a quasi-Impressionist, then neo-Cubist, Expressionist, Romantic, transcendent and today, et al. Some now even call it Middle Earth. For its European discovers and settlers the Pacific was a vast and idle emptiness to be claimed and put to work. This view persisted even as recently as the late twentieth century when the American, British, and French militaries displaced native populations and destroyed Pacific eco-systems in the course of testing nuclear weapons on islands and atolls throughout the Pacific. In thinking of landscape art two critical arguments almost immediately come to mind. The first would be that an artistic interest landscape is an idea that has passed its time, having reached its high point in New Zealand in the 1950s with maybe a brief reprise in the land art of the 1970s. Landscape has since been eclipsed by concerns of identity politics, particularly feminism, gender, and indigeneity along with theories derived from Continental Philosophy and post-modernism. The second argument, which follows on from the first, continues the devaluation of an interest in landscape. According to this argument any continued address of landscape amounts to a retrograde regionalism practiced, in the main, by white heterosexual males who find themselves on the wrong side of issues surrounding identity or high theory. Here, the white male film artist finds himself denied access to any subjectivity other than his role as an artist. He stands, regarding the landscape self- consciously rather than as the locale of a freely associating consciousness. Alone in the landscape his becomes a reflexive non-identity. A countering argument, based on the imminent threat to planetary eco-systems posed by global warming would call on humans to renew our attitudes, practices and relationship with the planet so as to effect the social, economic and personal transformations which may lead to balance, equity and sustainability. Heeding indigenous and other, older forms of knowledge artists may help us to envisage these transformations. Recently, Aruadhati Roy stated that, “If there is any hope for the world … it lies low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle everyday to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.” Aruadhati Roy. Decolonize the Consumerist Wasteland: Re-imagining a World Beyond Capitalism and Communinism. Accessed at: www.filmsforaction.org/news/decolonize_the_consumerist_wasteland_reimagining_a_world_beyond_capitalism_and_communism. June 1,2015. Politically, we apprehend New World landscapes overrun by technological systems that exploit them. We regard cinema as a technology that achieves and shapes our apprehension of the landscape. Such premonitions can lead to a self-consciousness in regards to relationships between cinematic apparatus, the landscape, culture, and the self. But what of the limits of technology and perception and how ‘things’ may come together within our sense of self-hood. In earlier periods of western history the invisible element of air represented the limits of knowledge. The perceiver knew it was there, could intuit it, but could not see it. Our existence, then, was thought to be subject to unseen and unknowable sources The air, the wind, our breath became a philosophical premise for our being. Enlightenment thought changed this. Citing Luce Irigaray, Carlo Mazzio tells us, “Luce Itigaray … argues that air is too easily forgotten in Post-Enlightenment philosophy. For Irigaray, this is because to base metaphysics on the air would undermine some cherished ideals about the power of the visual and the autonomy of thought. It would also unsettle the privilege of ‘things,’ ‘tools,’ and ‘techne’ for the grounding of empirical science as well as metaphysics. Without air, she argues, philosophy is itself a kind of walking ghost, a form of deadened thinking grounded on the tangible dimensions of ‘earth’ … rather than the “intangible, imperceptible, invisible, insensible, unintelligible” element of air out of which all thought and being proceed.” Carlo Mazzio. The Invisible Element in Art. Accessed at: https://www.academia.edu/12158341_The_Invisible_Element_in_Art. May 1,2015. It is an odd fact that many prominent landscape artists, from John Constable onwards, are urbanites, producing for urban audiences who all too often labour under serious misapprehensions about Nature. A John Berger. Landscapes John Berger on Art. London. Verso. 2016. p205.s the English writer John Berger tells us, “Urban living has always tended to produce a sentimental view of nature. Nature is thought of as a garden, or as a view framed by a window, or as an arena of freedom. Peasants, nomads and sailors have known better. Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any struggle.” In recent years Maori artists have asserted views of landscape that incorporate indigenous perspectives. This marks the on-going transition of the European idea of New Zealand to one of Aotearoa as a place which embraces Maori cultural and spiritual values as its foundation. It is from this foundation, Dame Anne Salmond tells us, that New Zealanders enter into a debate between European Enlightenment thinking and Maori values such as whakapapa and whenua rangitira - the structure of the universe and networks by which all things are linked together. An accord with Maori thinking can be found in the European concept of vitalism which recognizes the cosmos as a vast web of life in which people, plants, animals, insects and other phenomena are engaged in processes of reciprocal exchange which change over time. In New Zealand this type of relational thinking has been applied to the rights of Maori and ordinary people, freedom, participatory democracy, and environmentalism. Dame Anne Salmond: 2014 Rutherford Lectures.Radio New Zealand. Accessed at: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/rutherford-lectures/20141202 Always mindful of the Maori precedent, New Zealanders are caught within conceiving of the land as real estate, productive entity, or locus of indigenous tradition. They continually debate their way through issues of ownership, usage, and access to the land. For them the view of the landscape is not fixed. Instead, it can be approached from any number of viewpoints. For them, then, the landscape project remains alive and incomplete. And it may forever remain an open question. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering possible futures for landscape representation we need to review the history of landscape film and moving image in New Zealand. Generally, New Zealand landscape films have been photographically based, personal documentaries, each maker working in their own distinctive style, largely unaware of what the work of their contemporaries, local or international forbears. To a degree theirs could be called self-invented landscapes, though ones that reference western visual and media arts practice. JOANNA MARGARET PAUL (1945-2003) Through the shaped spaces of the bed’s frame; through the flower carved in the wood & through the window pane; through the pierced verandah hood, the foliate rose I see the straight & curved branches parting of a tree. Without the lens heaven,/ the heavens less understood J. M. Paul Bernadette Hall (Ed). Joanna Margaret Paul. Like Love Poems. Wellington. Victoria University Press. 2006. p17. In the 1970s the poet and painter Joanna Margaret Paul took up a movie camera and embarked on a series of modest personal films made mostly on the home movie format of Super 8mm. Her means, equipment and technique were low budget and primitive. Her films seem exploratory, as if seeking the same type of compositional clarity that she had been able to bring to her painting and poetry. Paul never sought to titillate an audience but instead aimed to speak directly to us from her inner self, through cinema. What we see in the arrangement of her images are the workings of her consciousness – how her mind put things together in free flowing encounters of self and place. Between 1970 and 1982 Paul made almost 40 experimental films. Her single-person cinema varied from personal documentary to lyrical landscape to ritualized performance of domesticity. These films laid bare her close attention to the world, simply illustrating her love of land, nature, friends and family, mediating a space between interior and exterior realities, between life and death, between culture and nature. Most of all Paul like to work at home. “I have never needed a studio to work in … I am trying to capture and idea from life …. My work originates in feeling … I like to avoid investing things with a symbolic meaning … I want my eye to be a fairly clear lens on the world. Things always have a lot to say to me, so I like to think they have something to say through me.” Gregory O’Brien, Lands and Deeds, Auckland: Godwit, 1996, p.68 Paul’s landscape studies were neither simple recording nor random assemblage. Working from shooting scripts composed on sheets of music paper she used her camera to explore landscape, hoping that her camera and editing eye may reveal hidden patterns, rhythms and meanings in nature. Seeing her artistic activities as being intimately related to everyday life Paul often portrayed the people and places that meant most to her. Her major landscape film is probably Port Chalmers Cycle (1970). This short Super 8mm film is divided into sections, each separated by white leader. In the first section a hand-held camera whirls through a landscape dotted with houses, stopping to pick out details – a railway station, a church, the rooftops of colonial villas, overgrown gardens and blooming flowers, washing drying on a clothesline – all markers of human activity and cultivation; an overgrown rustic suburbia. Our view at the beginning of Part Two is framed by windows, indicating that this is the artist’s subjective view and also formally referencing the photographic picture plane. The motif of drying washing is repeated, solitary figures and a couple moves through streets that are virtually devoid of human activity. Paul’s New Zealand is a lonely, isolated place. Part Three of the cycle is a hand-held point of shot as Paul’s camera moves along a pedestrian pathway near to a road along which various cars pass. Part Four is the most remarkable, evoking both the minimalism of Japanese calligraphy whilst also anticipating later developments in the paintings of the significant New Zealand artists Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon. We see titles, numbers and names written in stark contrasts of white on black, like chalk on a classroom blackboard. Words are photographed, stenciled onto industrial materials such as iron and wood, shipping containers and railway wagons through which glimpses of the landscape can be seen. Finally, we see a boat, a house, picket fence, chimneys and more clothes drying on a washing line as traces of an uneasy human presence that has altered the land. For Paul it seems that our human presence is tentative, we are mere shadows. “I am interested in the experience that goes beyond, for instance, the landscape. It’s something you can read in abstract or spiritual … as well as in representational terms.” Ibid, p.75 In looking at her films one gets the feeling that Paul consciously chose her images, isolating what was important for her. She struggled with the camera and editing processes in trying to establish a poetic unity with the world. Paul drowned accidentally in 2003. PHILIP DADSON Intermedia artist Philip Dadson also engaged the land in various media including film, video and audio in studies that often stress the unity of humans with nature. For his twelve minute long 16mm film Earthworks (1971), Dadson traveled with some others, including filmmakers Geoff Steven and Leon Narbey, to the North Island’s volcanic plateau where they filmed a slow circular camera pan around the desert landscape, finishing when the camera froze up. Dadson’s aim here was to bring something of the conceptual concerns of land art to film. The main elements of the film are the landscape, the camera pan around that landscape and fragments of audio simultaneously recorded at eight international locations giving detailed reports on local light conditions, climate and vegetation at a precise instant in time. As an extended moment of synchronicity the finished work comprises audio by geographically dispersed artists recorded at 1800 hours GMT on the Spring Equinox set against the image sequence that was shot in New Zealand at 1800 hours on the same day. “It had a lot of conceptual layers to it … dealing with the notion of earthworks, which, at the time, was a sculptural form … I wanted to do a piece that was using the earth in a planetary sense … It was about communications … people doing physical reports on their being in a particular place at a particular time, all the same time, all over the world.” Martin Rumsby, “Hear See Hear: An Interview with Philip Dadson, Illusions 37, Winter 2005, pp. 38-40 Following a residency in Antarctica in 2003 Dadson produced a series of landscape video works titled Polar Projects that were exhibited as installation works. For Aerial Farm Dadson manipulated a few short vertical camera pans up and down an array of transmission aerials during a blizzard at Scott Base in Antarctica. The black outline of the aerial against the whiteout conditions makes the form appear as a sketch a paper, but a sketch that moves. As the weather deteriorates the aerials are enveloped in snow, seeming to advance and recede through two and three dimensions thereby creating visual ambiguities for the viewer who may then begin to question the nature of appearances and relationships between individual perception, cultural constructions and nature. Stone Map, from the same series, is a more of a performance based work in which Dadson spins and swirls through the Antarctica landscape at twilight with a hand-held camera, subjectively mapping a field of stones. The viewer witnesses the artist’s experience of a pristine nature as Dadson performs an elaborate camera dance that suggests an invocation of the experience of nature and of living, perceiving and creating in the moment. The artist sees something redemptive in his ecstatic immersion in the landscape. DARCY LANGE (1946-2005) Darcy Lange worked for many years on a series of recordings of work that anticipate video surveillance. Bringing a sense of humanism and social concern to his work, Lange documented people at work, the landscapes they work in, human presence, as well as industrial and technological interventions that shape the land and its people. For Lange work was sanctified and he believed that in work we may discern certain truths. Locating himself as a servant of his culture, Lange straddled the boundaries between art, politics and society to create a realism in which art forms are congruent with the real world. Eschewing as artificial the constructions of montage, which he considered anti-naturalistic, Lange composed his shots in depth (shots in which all the compositional forms are in focus) as presentational works which do not violate the integrity of ‘real’ space and time. A series of Lange’s work shot in New Zealand in 1974 document aspects of the agri-industrial process from tree felling to fertilization through milking to butchery. Although Lange’s primary interest was to document people at work, to record those not normally afforded media representation, landscapes found their way into his studies as depictions of how people shape and exploit the land . Vern Hume, Aerial Top Dressing Taranaki (1974), is a study in three parts. The first part shows five trips recorded from inside a topdressing aircraft with Mt Taranaki as a backdrop. Each part is filmed from a different camera viewpoint. Where a conventional filmmaker may seek to instill dynamism and a sense of action into the work by inter-cutting back and forwards between different viewpoints in a montage construction, Lange would have none of this. In the following sections of the work, he recorded the aircraft from the ground, using a fixed tripod view, a fluid head tripod view and a hand-held view of the circling aircraft. Finally, Lange recorded the lunch break, where the three men involved in the land fertilization process – the pilot, farmer and videographer commune over lunch where they discuss the relative merits not of the land, their work, nature or art but rather of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, a humorous pun on their land fertilization activities. Lange’s rural background (he grew up on a Taranaki dairy farm) and a Calvinist work ethic instilled in him at a young age probably figured in his direct, unsentimental objectifications of the land. He saw a pragmatic relationship between humans and the land they lived and worked on. According to Lange, any relationship that we form with nature must be tempered by a respect for indigenous rights and beliefs. To this end he worked between 1977 and 1980 on the Maori Social, Cultural and Land Project hoping that his work may help to bridge competing notions of New Zealand and Aotearoa. “I feel this work is and always will be ongoing. It is only the essence of New Zealand – or Aotearoa – or Aotea New Zealand Roa.” Ibid, p.14. JANINE RANDERSON Interest in forms of landscape art is not confined to nineteenth and twentieth century New Zealand artists. Younger practitioners such as Janine Randerson continue to explore landscape and environmental concerns in their work. Viewing Floor (Installation, 2001) brings to mind surveillance culture as a camera repeatedly pans across a high rise urban landscape in a little sonata of ownership, surveillance and control. Skyviews (2001) presents a paranoid musing on technology going awry in an urban environment. This theme is repeated in Endless Column (2003). Here autonomous machines come to life, threatening human existence. For Until It Runs Out (2014), a two-channel digital video work was filmed for over a year in the Mangere inlet of Auckland’s Manukau Harbor. Utilizing expired black and white film stock she recorded the mini-ecosystems around the old Manukau Bridge, an artificially constructed beach, and local birdlife, to address the culture/nature divide. The English academic Sean Cubitt cites Randerson asserting that, “Metereological art has to do something beyond communicating the evidence of climate science, or it is no more than public relations. If art is (and this is unclear) distinct from design, then it must be because design provides solutions, where art asks questions.” Sean Cubitt. Angelic Ecologies in, Millennium Film Journal #58, Fall 2013. pp46-51. OTHER VOICES Working in Auckland, Bay of Plenty and the North Island East Coast regions during the early 1980s, Simon Buckle created several semi-abstract Super 8mm landscape films. Often including Maori titles and subject matter, Buckle subjected his image progressions to direct film interventions by painting on, scratching and otherwise manipulating his footage. Shooting subjects in single frame mode, Buckle would later project his work at 1, 6 or 8 frames a second. (Standard film projection speed being 24 frames a second for sound or 18 frames a second for silent films). In this way he could stretch out what would normally be a two and a half minute film to 20 minutes in length. An economical film artist he successfully presented his work in bars, clubs, lounges and alternative screening venues around Auckland. In recent years a new voice representing indigenous readings of landscape has arisen in New Zealand one which addresses the idea of New Zealand evolving into Aotearoa as a society that admits a Maori system of values. It is through landscape, the Art Historian Rangihiroa Panoho tells us, that stories in Maori art are made real, “Specific place names remind us that the art is intimately connected to the historical memory of events and personalities embedded in the land.” Rangihiroa Panoho. Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Auckland. Bateman. 2015. p38, 39 Pourewa (2006) by Maree Mills addresses the local relationship with the land, metaphorically lamenting the carving up and economic desecration of what, for Maori, is consecrated ground. Describing Rachael Rakena’s Aniwaniwa (2006) Mills tell us, “Aniwaniwa references a homeland lost by the damming of the mighty Waikato River. Submerged vessels communicate the analogy of cultural loss.” Maree Mills, Contemporary Maori Womens New Media Practice, abandoned PhD Thesis, University of Waikato Rose-Michelle Lee’s video installation Te Whatu o Poutini (2007) and Natalie Roberstson’s Uncle Tasman: the Trembling Current that Scars the Earth (2007) also address issues of self and environment from an indigenous point of view. For In Pursuit of Venus (2013) artist Lisa Reihana reconstructs a nineteenth century French wallpaper design Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique of idealized Tahitian scenes. Here, the wallpaper becomes a backdrop for live performers superimposed onto it. The action serves to refigure the wallpaper within a sensual post-colonial discourse of indigenous politics and reality. A more complete essay on contemporary Maori & Pasifika artists’ cinema titled The Ocean Is Our Prairie is published in Millennium Film Journal #61, May, 2015. For Reihana, the work presents a native viewpoint, of looking out toward the colonizer. “It puts the spectator on the tangata whenua (people of the land/Maori) side … we are looking out toward the water. There’s one scene which is the haka. You don’t usually see the haka from behind. This is the difference between being performed to and trying to cut across this notion of exotica.” Lisa Reihana. Circuit Cast Episode 23: An Interview with Lisa Reihana. Accessed at www.circuit.org.nz May 21, 2015. Poutama (2015) by Tanya Ruka addresses themes of ascension and enlightenment in the course of moving from the mythic darkness (te kore) to light (te ao) within a setting of traditional Maori tukutuku Tukutuku – patterned paneling incorporated into Maori meeting houses. design. In work which Ruka thinks of as a form of digital weaving, Tanya Ruka. Personal email to the author. May 7, 2015. the landscape is regarded as an ancestor, an individual with its own rights. Richard von Sturmer’s The Open Broken (2015), part one of a planned trilogy, is a short science-fiction piece which tells of the end of one life and the beginning of another. Set to a haunting music track by Jed Town, the video opens on a contemplative image of a moss covered rock sitting in water. The scale is indeterminate. Next, we see a sparsely vegetated volcanic landscape. During the third shot, a pan over a barren landscape, we are offered a survivor’s testimony. She tells of a year that the hummingbirds and lizards disappeared and of scientists discovering new organisms in geo-thermal pools and over-heated oceans. Ephemeral clouds of steam float above clear, emerald coloured water as the narrator continues, telling how these life forms multiplied in clouds of plasma and bursts of light, overcoming humans before setting them adrift in the universe. Eventually, some survivors came together in forests and caves before returning to the ruins of the cities of their past lives. They have come through an immense darkness and on this side of it their former lives are now no more than phantom existences. Accepting these events as an inevitability the narrator tells of her sense of relief that the transformation has brought about and calls for new charts to navigate new realities. “Now and then,’ The Open Broken ends, ‘rain falls from the blue sky.’ The charts or maps that von Sturmer’s narrator calls for may lead us to what the philosopher Alain Badiou says are the construction of new truths or sets of ideas by which we may open our experience of the world up to something larger than ourselves. “There is no Idea of the Idea. This absence, moreover, can be named ‘Truth.’ Exposing the thing in truth, the Idea is true and is, therefore, always the idea of the true, but the True is not an idea.” Alain Badiou. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Cambridge, UK. Polity. 2011. p107. To be effective, or real, art, life, and truth will always be more than ideas. Over the past few years expatriate film artist Alexander Greenhough has created 30 short, silent, subtly spectacular works tracing the meeting of natural phenomena, such as light, and human perception mediated by cinematic technology. These include States of Matter (c2015), Shape and Flow (c2014), Aperture (c2014), Night (c2013), Ousia (c2013) and more. Based in Taranaki for several years until 2013, artist Peter Wareing produced several landscape moving image works. In (d-2) (2007), one of four videos shot on a foreshore, we see a landscape split in two, as itself and an out-of-face mirror image. The camera tentatively records the intersection of land and sea, the meeting of place and self and their attendant separation from each other. The artist believes that our rationality and social conditioning splits us from our own deep seated intuition. Wareing’s artistic rituals suggest a way of bridging these schisms to reconnect with more natural, and therefore less social, ways of thinking and apprehending. The title of his short Super 8mm film From Tiziano Vecello to Barnett Newman and Back suggests Wareing’s visual art bias – locating his work within the history of visual arts rather than within narrative or documentary. Here the film frame is again divided in half, one side being an aerial depiction on the coastal Boulder Bank around Nelson, New Zealand, the other of a man walking along the coastline. We hear the sound of automobiles and the voice of a fairground announcer as a reproduction of the Italian renaissance painting Venus and Adonis by Tiziano Vecello (Titian) washes up on the shore. The man lies down amongst driftwood and rocks, contemplates the image, then gets up and returns it to the sea. The man has found himself at an intersection of culture and nature. He is an intermediary returning to his homeland after experiencing international metropolitan culture. He experiences a split which he is unable to negotiate. Towards the end of this short film the waves appear to break in reverse, un-forming, as a deconstruction of nature; suggesting that Wareing may wish to turn back time and return to his originating European culture. Wareing moved to England in 2013. Members of the PIctorial Research Group in Wellington utilized technology as a compositional determinant in works such as NZ a Random Geographical Survey (1997/98). Here a computer was used to select twenty random geographical locations throughout New Zealand. The filmmakers then traveled to these locations and filmed them. One of the more conceptually interesting landscape works in recent times has been Colin Hodson’s String Through the Earth (2009). This work humorously depicts a fictional conversation through a home-made communication device consisting of an extreme length of string, with tin canisters attached to each end of the string. A man and a woman talk to each other through the device which extends through thermal portals in the ground between New Zealand and Iceland. At one point, a family group of tourists, exploring the thermal region come upon the protagonist (Hodson) alone, filming himself talking into a tin can attached to what can only be a dissolving piece of string which descends into the bubbling, steaming hot pool. Hodson, who has been involved as an actor, writer, director and producer of over a dozen independent films since the mid-1990s, was an associate member of the Wooster Group when he lived in New York City. After returning to New Zealand he became involved with the Aro Valley independent film group. In Sonar Realidad Interior (2008), Sam Hamilton created an installation environment at the New Zealand Film Archive in Auckland. This work, a virtual ecological system in itself, was made up of audio he recorded in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, Columbia, and Peru. Entering the environment the viewer negotiated a jungle of dangling cords, audio players, and fungal, flowering speaker cones. Finding a clearing in the environment one could sit in contemplation of a transported rainforest in an urban industrial space. Anticipating developing ideas of eco-poetic media, Sam Hamilton created Apple Pie (2015), a forty minute long film in ten parts. Shot in Samoa, New Zealand, and the United States, Hamilton considers potential relationships between asteroids and earth’s oceans, the human species, the self in community, as well as our further relationships with technology and the environment. I have also made several landscape films. Reversing the idea of New Zealand as a setting for foreign, particularly American, movies and TV series, I shot a series of low-budget experimental in North America between 1985 and 2005. American Sketchbook (2000) depicts a landscape transforming into a mediascape. For Dots (2003) and Brown’s Barbeque (2006) are almost ethnographic urban landscape films set in Chicago. Other work, including Vistas (1985), Driveway (c2006) as well as the abandoned Rewa and Outsider Trading addressed the New Zealand landscape. A trace of these two abandoned urban landscape works can be found in EYE I AYE (2015), a work that operates on the level of the everyday. With the exception of von Sturmer, Hamilton and Randerson – who all address the global and planetary in their work - many of the above artists address an older idea of landscape. They are not quite settler landscapes, footsteps and markers of particular cultural and perceptual viewpoints. Today, as the universe and cyberspace expand at increasing velocities the available landscape and its resources are degraded and diminish before our eyes. The landscape and thinking about it are becoming increasingly contested spaces. Artists can embrace thought, stepping back from the frame to admit philosophical perspectives on our place in the world. The anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, for example, defined humans by their openness to the world. An openness that, for him, suggested a corresponding separateness from the world. Because of this he conceived of humanness as an incomplete entity, a factor that makes us unpredictable and dangerous. Baruch Spinoza argued that what is real and positive in us is what unites us with the whole. Aristotle believed that all things have an end, a meaning, and connection. Each thing assumes its own place in the unfolding of becoming, in attaining its own destiny. Perspectives derived from anthropology, philosophy, geography and other disciplines can be brought to bear on our thinking of the landscape and the wider universe that landscape represents. Rather than depicting landscape from idyllic or alienated viewpoints we will re- think how we shape the landscape and the uses we put it to. We now have the ability to connect the entire human race with the planetary biosphere in a neuro-network by which our extended human family is interconnected with all fellow life on the planet. Jeremy Rifkin: Are We Moving from a Capitalist to a Collaborative Economy? Accessed at http://youtube.com/watch?v=wCLPizjSe6I&feature=youtu.be December 30, 2014 We can talk of indigeneity, agriculture, migration, resource extraction, globalization, architecture, climate change, and communications networks. And of where we stand in relation to a planetary conception of place and the communities that we create and live in. For these are all aspects of our contemporary landscape. What, we may ask, is it that is real and positive about us as human beings and how may we establish an equality and interdependence between ourselves and the wider world? What would unite us with that greater wholeness rather than separate us within and amongst ourselves? What capability do we have to exercise the good in our relationship with the planet and other human beings? In the future we may not talk so much of landscape cinema as of an Eco-poetic Media. This may be based on a new conception of consciousness drawn from physical and mental ecologies which emphasize equilibrium between all things, including the machines we increasingly rely on, in networked flows of a consciousness of interdependence. It will come from a place where We exists before I and the We is one of inter-related heterogeneous communities. 17