Zenvisions or why do we look at the landscape?

Transforming spaces into places is existential activity, as through the creation of places people visualise, memorise and thus stabilise constitutive human goods such as the sense of belonging, social integration, purposes that give meaning to life (values) and the sense of self.

Williams et al. 1992

Place is security, space is freedom.

Yi-Fu Tuan

Place attachment is described as a positive emotional bond that develops between groups or individuals and their environment.

This builds up an internal orientation too. This self-reference could be described as the ties that we make and integrate into our being. In this way place identity represents certain aspects of self identity, induced and reflected by the environment. This comes with all the aesthetic, social and personal meanings attached.

Altman and Low 1992; Korpela 1989

Place serves as an external memory for people’s place-related aspects of their self-identity, called place identity. The function of place-identity is to regulate (stabilize and develop) people’s self-identity.

Proshansky et al. 1983

It is helpful to recognise that landscape experience can be differentiated into two modes, as place and as space. These experiential modes enable humans to fulfil different basic human needs: recreative and aesthetical activities and restoration on the one hand, regulation of identity and representation of meanings (values, norms, experiences) on the other hand.

M. Hunziker, M. Buchecker, T. Hartig 2007

There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever, for a child the time until a birthday is endless. Whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Their mental landscape is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Landscape representation

The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present from its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.

Neuroaesthetics and the aesthetic triad

Recognition of visual patterns (graphic principles) triggers the activation of the limbic system and related reward processes linked to aesthetic values and experiences.

Neuro-aesthetics defines the aesthetic properties of objects (transmitters) that lead to the aesthetic experience in the brain of the observer (receiver), and aims to address the nature of aesthetic experience from a science-based perspective.

Aesthetic experiences are an emergent property of interactions among a triad of neural systems that involve sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge circuitry.

About the process

Kyūdō (弓道) is the Japanese martial art of archery. Kyūdō is based on kyūjutsu («art of archery»), which originated with the samurai class of feudal Japan.

Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!» he exclaimed. «The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.

Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

Bibliography

• Yi-Fu Tuan, Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape.

• Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

• P. Abello and G. Bernaldez, Landscape preference and personality, Landscape and Urban Planning.

• Menatti and A. Casado da Rocha, Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance, Frontiers in Psychology, 2016.

• Hunziker, T. Hartig, M. Buchecker, Space and Place – Two Aspects of the Human-landscape Relationship, published in A Changing World: Challenges for Landscape Research, F. Kienast, O. Wildi, S. Ghosh (eds.), Springer, 2007.

• Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin, The brain on art: intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network.

• Anne-Sophie Tribot , Julie Deter and Nicolas Mouquet, Integrating the aesthetic value of landscapes and biological diversity.

• Deborah Halber, Motivation: Why You Do the Things You Do.