7 Gaze into the Landscape: Can Sensory Immersion, Landscape Reading and . . .
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“earthlings”, not people of the sea. As we have seen, a description of actual experience
is the most appropriate method to determine our relationship with the world we call
“landscape”. So we will begin by describing the specific situation of the underwater
landscape. Using our imagination, we will undertake a brief phenomenology of the
body submerged, with a view to understanding the challenges inherent in the tools
we must invent to adapt to this new landscape.
7.3.1 Water as a Perceptive Filter and the Submerged Body:
Two Fundamental Features of the Underwater World
The first striking difference in perception compared to terrestrial landscape is the
body submerged. We float, often horizontally. The second radically new and patently
obvious factor is water. In “air”, we seldom feel the need to specify that this gaseous
environment is the usual setting of what we call landscape. The air’s relative homogeneity allows light to diffuse and coincides with our primary sense—our eyesight—,
leading us to believe that space is “transparent”. To the best of our knowledge, Gilles
Clément is the only landscape designer to have taken an interest in the “clouds” that
blur and populate sky and landscape
19 , fighting ignorance of the weather and of the
passage of time, reclaiming the hours of the day, the seasons and other atmospheric
variables. While we know little about the relative opacity of air (mist, polarisation,
humidity), the materiality of water and its role as a perceptive filter are evident. It
is, incidentally, approximately a thousand times denser than the mixture of gases we
breathe on earth. The effects on the observer’s body are naturally considerable.
7.3.2 “Moving Being in Moving Space”
With no fixed anchor point, diving puts us in total motion, under the effects of
external flows (current, swell) and our own movements (kicking flippers, swimming,
breathing). We even move by breathing. Freed from weight, the body’s own lift
provides our fragile bearing on the water’s fleeting surface. But for the weight of
the cylinder, our lungs would bring us back to the surface, like air-filled balloons.
A diver’s centre of gravity merges with the Archimedean point. Everything hinges
on the balance point around which, like an airship, the slightest impulse changes
our direction. Only biology counters the dream of modulating the body’s floatation
with precise measurements of air. The interplay between our inner breathing and
our vertical (the more the lungs are filled with air, the more we are drawn to the
surface, and vice versa) and horizontal movements is such that, when mastered,
our quiet, serene displacement impacts our very perception of the landscape. With
every buoyant movement, however slight, we feel carried through time and space.
19 Gilles Clément, Nuages, Bayard, 2005.
97
“earthlings”, not people of the sea. As we have seen, a description of actual experience
is the most appropriate method to determine our relationship with the world we call
“landscape”. So we will begin by describing the specific situation of the underwater
landscape. Using our imagination, we will undertake a brief phenomenology of the
body submerged, with a view to understanding the challenges inherent in the tools
we must invent to adapt to this new landscape.
7.3.1 Water as a Perceptive Filter and the Submerged Body:
Two Fundamental Features of the Underwater World
The first striking difference in perception compared to terrestrial landscape is the
body submerged. We float, often horizontally. The second radically new and patently
obvious factor is water. In “air”, we seldom feel the need to specify that this gaseous
environment is the usual setting of what we call landscape. The air’s relative homogeneity allows light to diffuse and coincides with our primary sense—our eyesight—,
leading us to believe that space is “transparent”. To the best of our knowledge, Gilles
Clément is the only landscape designer to have taken an interest in the “clouds” that
blur and populate sky and landscape
19 , fighting ignorance of the weather and of the
passage of time, reclaiming the hours of the day, the seasons and other atmospheric
variables. While we know little about the relative opacity of air (mist, polarisation,
humidity), the materiality of water and its role as a perceptive filter are evident. It
is, incidentally, approximately a thousand times denser than the mixture of gases we
breathe on earth. The effects on the observer’s body are naturally considerable.
7.3.2 “Moving Being in Moving Space”
With no fixed anchor point, diving puts us in total motion, under the effects of
external flows (current, swell) and our own movements (kicking flippers, swimming,
breathing). We even move by breathing. Freed from weight, the body’s own lift
provides our fragile bearing on the water’s fleeting surface. But for the weight of
the cylinder, our lungs would bring us back to the surface, like air-filled balloons.
A diver’s centre of gravity merges with the Archimedean point. Everything hinges
on the balance point around which, like an airship, the slightest impulse changes
our direction. Only biology counters the dream of modulating the body’s floatation
with precise measurements of air. The interplay between our inner breathing and
our vertical (the more the lungs are filled with air, the more we are drawn to the
surface, and vice versa) and horizontal movements is such that, when mastered,
our quiet, serene displacement impacts our very perception of the landscape. With
every buoyant movement, however slight, we feel carried through time and space.
19 Gilles Clément, Nuages, Bayard, 2005.