Exploring Interpretations of Wilderness and our Human Need for Understanding. Hypotheses: - If wild does exist Man can never know it. - We are in a relationship with our environment. - Context is understood through notions of place. - Place is a melding of self and space. - Nature is fluid.

Links: http://www.urbanautica.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Smiles http://ravereader.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/unforgiven_ladies.jpeg?w=288&h=220 http://www.bullersofbuchan.me.uk/ http://www.maurostaccioli.org/per/index.html http://jules-barnes.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=2 http://www.adultswim.com/promos/201109_unclassified/ http://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/ http://simonhughes.ca/index.php?/project/2003---2004/ http://fotos.miarroba.es/fo/8a09/344DA721BA344D3891DA254D3890C6.jpg http://scottishsculptureworkshop.wordpress.com/current-artists/ http://places.designobserver.com/feature/land-speed-and-bonneville/14798/

I was here in my imagination long before I actually came here. Suddenly this stay has become a sojourn in a previous existence. (Baudrillard, J. America, 1989) "Landscape", writes Jean Cabanel "The same word is used for when the hiker in the woods spots a forest 'landscape' or else to describe the 'landscape' of mountains you can enjoy from one of the 'scenic outlooks' indicated in a guidebook. In both cases, the term evokes the relationship that gets established, in a given time and place, between an observer and the space embraced by their gaze. Through the observers own sensorial and cultural filters, they apprehend what become for them a spectacle laden with meaning - an 'impression', as Claude Monet stated so well. Thus, a landscape is not an object, but a singular, fleeting event." (Ardene, P. Giving shape to the emotional landscape, 2000) The explorer's habit of place-naming was not only a function of their imperial instinct. It was also a more fundamental mechanism for making sense of the landscapes that, by virtue of their extreme difference from home, might otherwise have been unknowable...For the explorer's names gave meaning and to a landscape which might have been repetitively meaningless. They shaped space, allowed points to be held in relation to one another. They provided a stability - the stability of language, of narrative, of plot...Naming was and remains a way to place space within a wider matrix of significance: a way, essentially, to make the unknown known. (MacFarlane, R. Mountains of the Mind, 2004) Of course, [Michael Day] Jackson can be seen to be undergoing the typically macho-romantic process of quasi-religious self-discovery - characterised by a fascination with danger, destruction, fetishisation of machines and imagery of skulls - that powers a number of American subcultures. Indeed, one of Jackson's current projects is the creation of a drag racing team, starring himself (apparently the fourth generation of a family of racing drivers) as the driver. Jackson will run the Super Comp Dragster racing team for one season, or until the car he is currently building is rendered mechanically unfit. At the end of the process, the car will be turned into a sculpture - like an artwork, Jackson notes, every experience of the driving the car, which the artist terms 'terrestrial space travel', can be replicated as a psychic or mental experience when a viewer responds to the work in an art gallery. (Art Review, May 2011)