Landscapes

The work is a step into the microscopic world.

It looks not at the microscopic world, but looks from within it, by being in it.  If I am a tiny insect, these are my landscapes.

How do you imagine soil? It is certainly not a homogenous mass of similar particles. When one looks into the earth closely, it becomes easy to see what is really inside.


This thin top layer of the earth from the lower atmosphere to a few meters below the surface is called the Critical Zone(CZ).


One of the problems researchers face in picturing the CZ is to give it a shape. Compared to the immensity of the geophysical globe, the intricacies of the CZ vanish from view. This is the limit of what could be called the “planetary view” of the earth made familiar since the time of the scientific revolution and reinforced by the iconic image of the Blue Planet.


-Giving Depth to the Surface –  an Exercise in the Gaia-graphy of Critical Zones

* Alexandra Arènes°, Bruno Latour§, Jérôme Gaillardet+

SOC°, Sciences Po§, Physique du Globe+


The film is made from field recordings from different patches of the Earth. It looks at the perceptual world about 300 times smaller than our perceptual world. At this scale human constructed worlds are fundamentally different from the belowground. The belowground has a diversity of plant, mycelium and insect species, each of which contributes to the complex landscapes and micro ecosystems we see in the film.




*The image on the screen is about 7 millimeters across in human length standards.