Landscape Futures. Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions

“Landscape Futures” is an exhibition curated by Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG, on display at the Nevada Museum of Art through February 12, 2012.

The exhibition offer visitors “unexpected access to the invisible—and often fantastical—streams of data constantly generated by the landscapes around us.”

Above: Electric Aurora, by Liam Young

Highly technologic functioning devices, large-scale installations, technical prototypes, and wall-sized graphics give a view of the future which is magical and real at once.

Landscape Futures explores how planetary landscapes, and our perceptions of them, can be utterly transformed by technology and design. Specifically, it will investigate the shifting terrains of architectural invention, where the construction of new spatial devices on a variety of scales, from the inhabitable to the portable, can uncover previously inaccessible aspects of the built and natural environments. The devices on display—and the traces they reveal—will thus demonstrate that the landscape around us is like sheet music: an interpretive repository of bewildering variation that can be captured and made visible (even audible) through the perceptual instruments and recording devices that we invent.

The show features commissioned works from six architects and artists having already been mentioned or promoted by Manaugh in his blog over the last few years: David Benjamin & Soo-in Yang (The Living), Mark Smout & Laura Allen (Smout Allen), David Gissen, Mason White & Lola Sheppard (Lateral Office), Chris Woebken & Kenichi Okada, and Liam Young.

In the process, this group exhibition will reveal the multitude of ways through which landscapes can be read, cataloged, interpreted, and understood; but it will also ask questions. How, for instance, can these and other future tools be imagined, designed, and materially implemented? What potential uses might be found for something that alters how we see, read, and understand our surroundings?

Here’s some beautiful images of the mechanisms featured in the show:

Smout Allen, Surface Tension “a room-sized kinetic device, hydrological model, and terrain computer”, according to Manaugh:

Liam Young of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today: Specimens of Unnatural History, a “robot Galapagos,” emergent technology transposed on the natural world.

Also explore Young’s work conducted at the Architectural Association with his nomadic studio group Unknown Fields Division. With expeditions to a gold mine in Australia to the Amazon in South America, the studio seeks to explore the socio-political and cultural issues hidden away within the raw material which make up the earth’s geography.