World beyond the horizon: Reconstructing the complexity of the ‘normal’ experience.

• Main Author: Bourke, SF
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: perception; flight view; Tasmania; optical laboratory; synthetic vision; remanufactured landscape; experimental film; Antarctica; New Zealand; Erebus disaster; mental-sets; Antarc*; Antarctica New Zealand
• Online Access: https://eprints.utas.edu.au/11629/; https://eprints.utas.edu.au/11629/1/01front.pdf; https://eprints.utas.edu.au/11629/2/whole-bourke.pdf

World Beyond the Horizon explores the way people witness and experience variations of light falling on a landscape. To support the investigation I used the case study of the 1979 Mt Erebus aviation disaster in Antarctica, to explore degraded visual functioning, a condition resulting from variable perceptual experiences formed through the senses. The landscape of Northern Tasmania was surveyed from the cockpit of an aircraft – the ‘flight view’, where sound recordings and video data were collected to study the extent to which light conditions may affect the process of perception. The work of John Constable and Joseph Turner who, through their own art practices, pioneered new ways to depict light in the 1800’s, have been central to my investigation. In his paintings, Constable predicts changing weather patterns, through time, by referring to the science of meteorology. By contrast, Turner’s paintings are freely abstract, atmospheric and immediate with recognisable forms disappearing almost entirely, leaving only light, space and natural elements. Constable offers a pictorial forecast of the weather as a pilot would witness it from the ground, where as Turner places himself in the weather as a pilot would do while flying. The work of Constable and Turner expresses ideas of observation and participation that are integral and complementary to my study of the ‘flight view’. To experiment with the paradox of reality and illusion and to create the synthetic experience of ‘scientific landscapes’, I designed and built an optical laboratory. The outcomes of this have been presented as a video-sound installation.