The Self Observing Landscape

AA Visiting School, On-going

The Visiting School “The Self-Observing Landscape” proposes an educational program built around the construction of small digital landscapes, replicas of portions of physical territory, which can constitute small initial fragments of large-scale three-dimensional mapping.  

The digital tools we use to represent the geography of the Earth are rapidly changing, becoming everyday more sophisticated, complex and hard to control. Today, the need to create a “digital twin” of everything emerges at every scale, from the 3D scanning of single objects to the production of complex simulations of the entire planet (designed to observe the mutations of the planet in real time and, consequently, to predict its future developments).

In some places, such as the Alpine areas of Northern Italy, meteorological changes, environmental disasters and demographic mutations of animal species are constantly tracked and simulated by the digital counterpart. The digital simulations become tools for interpreting the Present and simultaneously, predicting the Future. A new landscape emerges, able to observe itself through its prosthetic extension, its cybernetic twin.