Energy Landscapes
The term 'energy landscape' was coined in direct response to widespread and widely noticeable wind farms. However, the term's career in the field of geography is owed to the fact that all landscapes shaped by practices of energy supply can generally be described as energy landscapes. This includes infrastructure for energy production and processing, for transmission and storage, as well as for distribution and disposal. In addition to wind turbines and solar panels, the cultivation of energy crops, mines, surface mines, oil fields, reservoir dams, water turbines, high-voltage power lines, pipelines, refineries, power plants, permanent disposal sites and landfills should thus also be considered elements that turn cultural landscapes in the broader sense into energy landscapes in the stricter sense. However, also the large European deforested landscapes that have changed the appearance of the countryside since Antiquity and the reforested landscapes, particularly from the 19th century onwards, can be understood as energy landscapes. Our point of departure is certainly the new energy landscapes that have emerged and will continue to emerge in the near future as a result of the transition to renewable energies. Nonetheless, we seek to offer an expanded framework for the discussion of these present and future transformations of landscape by providing a profound historical dimension and, above all, aesthetic and cross-cultural perspectives.
In energy studies, it has been argued that most interventions in natural environments serve to exploit energetic resources. In fact, logging, draining of swamps, building dams and canals, all of which have resulted in the transformation of 'pristine' nature into cultural landscapes, were prerequisites for pastoral agriculture primarily aimed at the generation of metabolic energy and thus also at the preservation or increase of both animal and human labor as well as the establishment of trade and military routes. In addition, the mining and smelting industry, serving the extraction of metals in particular, radically changed the landscape early on in certain narrowly defined regions. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the appearance of the landscape in Central Europe and North America was influenced by windmills and watermills. Thus, we propose to investigate the long-standing tradition of (visual) artistic representations of landscape - i.e. landscape painting, photography, land art, landscape architecture, landscape poetry, narrated and described landscapes up to (new) nature writing – in order to identify traces of their energy-related history and to reflect on the aesthetic categories emerging in the perception, description, shaping and representation of these energy landscapes. The aim is to render the transformations of landscapes driven by the growing demand for energy legible.
The study of energy landscapes contributes to a history of the imagination of forces inasmuch as it addresses the visualization of what is essentially invisible. Dealing with 'energy' as the modern successor for the concept of force is in principle subject to the same epistemic and aisthetic problems we face when thinking about forces. Whereas the appliances for generating and transmitting energy, the output and effects as well as emissions and residues are certainly visible and tangible, energy itself remains inaccessible to our sensory perception. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the study of perceptual patterns therefore plays a crucial role in monitoring energy transitions in the socio-political sphere. Provided it is correct that current problems of acceptance regarding the energy transition are partly related to aesthetic conditioning, it is on the one hand necessary to reflect on the historical formation and range of cultural variation of these categories of judgement, and on the other hand to ponder on the concrete aesthetic design of energy landscapes. The working group would like to contribute to both these goals in various formats of events and discussions.