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Updated September 12, 2006

Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild

Chapter 1            Introduction          

Chapter 2            Stories Hidden, Stories Lost          

Chapter 3            Datascape           

Chapter 4            Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild          

Chapter 5            Sonic Panoramas          

Chapter 6            Network and Social Visualization          

Chapter 7            SignalPlay           

Chapter 8            Conclusions        

Abstract of the Thesis

Landscape Denatured:
Digitizing the Wild

By

Eric Alan Kabisch

Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art,
with a concentration in Arts Computation Engineering
University of California, Irvine
Professor Simon Penny, Chair

This paper presents motivation and documentation of four technologically enabled artworks. These artworks explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography. A framework is provided for analyzing these works of art. This framework addresses the impacts of technology as a three-part cyclical process that includes (1) sensing elements of the environment, (2) analyzing and creating narratives from the captured data, and (3) the propagation of these methods and representations back into the world.

SignalPlay is an interactive installation that employs wireless sensors to control a spatialized sound environment, allowing participants to explore a distributed collaborative system. Unexceptional.net is a web-based application for visualizing and sonifying network, database and player information of a multi-modal online role-playing game. Sonic Panoramas utilizes image sonification, immersive projection and camera-based machine vision to allow users to create an interactive musical experience from panoramic landscape imagery. Datascape is a periscope-like system for the visualization of geographic information. This system allows users to explore a 3D topography and musical soundtrack that are generated from geospatial information such as marketing demographics.

In addressing the impacts of digital technologies on culture, these artworks employ the very technologies being investigated. Through the production and exhibition of this work, I hope to engage the public with these important issues and to help shape the ways that technological methodology embeds itself in our world and in our daily experience.