Transgression in the landscape can surprisingly make it seem strange and even unknown to us, often a phantasmagoric landscape as a spatial representation of the historical archive of the memory of the present. In this way we can understand the nature of a society through its manifestations in space, and as a result through its impact on the landscape. As an example, our need for communication causes the appearance of mobile phones, antennas, power stations, distribution and customer attention shops, and our need for electricity means that high tension pylons criss-cross the countryside. We can understand “landscape” as any area that includes both natural features and those shaped by man, and which has a visual reflection on space. Then we must understand that, in fact, practically all human activities have a reflection on space, and therefore modify the landscape.

One of humanity’s earliest aspirations has always been to control nature, first to take shelter from the harshness of the elements, and then to take things from it and use it for survival. For a long time the desire to control and dominate nature has placed us and all living things and even the earth itself in danger. As a result, ethical questions about these desires for control have arisen, and also about the way we should direct the use of our increasing knowledge of nature and the technologies we create to control it.

If transgression in this landscape we are talking about implies a transgression of the norm or an established value as a landmark, perhaps an “ideal landscape”, are we facing an increasing and irreversible transgression of the landscape? Or rather as far as we are animals which differ among ourselves and in this difference we build culture, is this transgression we refer to a fundamental part of our way of being? Perhaps, as Maturana and Varela say, it is not a question of controlling nature but rather of discussing and co-operating with it because we have realised that we are part of it in complete interaction with it.

The technological sciences such as geology try to gain knowledge about the earth, geography about the land and landscape, biology about life and living creatures and their manifestations, architecture about constructions in space and ecology about the relation between the different organisms themselves and also about the environment in which we live. These are a few of the technological sciences which affect our way of seeing and living in the world and which also nourish our collective imagination which constructs and deconstructs the landscape we live in. These sciences make it possible to intervene in and modify our surroundings.

Knowledge progresses and often we are unable to understand the socio-cultural meaning which each new possibility opens up for us, with each new discovery or each new technological application which can effect the evolution of nature. The potent ideas brought about by the techno-sciences jar our minds and we try to find ways to understand what we are beginning to understand thanks to the complexity of our acquired knowledge. And so, from the intersection between art, science and technology artistic practices emerge which, using concepts or developing applications of the techno-sciences, directly influence this transgressive process of the different elements which make up the landscape. Practices which seek out the intuition of complex theories or the modification of our perception of the world by generating outstanding experiences.

Landscape is defined by its shapes, natural or anthropic, and is composed of abiotic, biotic or anthropic elements which articulate among themselves. If we focus on the study of biotic shapes in relation to the landscape, and the potential of underlying “transgression”, some say that biology is the science of the twenty-first century, and that if until now physics has been the science that has most influenced the other sciences, from now on biology will play the predominant role, in all the remaining fields of knowledge. Perhaps those who believe this are right, because the spectacular advances made in this field force us to be aware of its great potential. A potential which together with medicine and the biotechnologies enables us to manipulate, modify, retouch, transform and even transgress –if there are norms which can be referred to and broken– the living systems.

The power of calculation, of generating models and simulation with computers and computer science has made it possible to develop new fields of knowledge and has accelerated the techno-scientific industry giving place to new technologies and scientific discoveries. The conclusion of the Human Genome project, genic therapies, cloning and the manipulation of embryos or the much talked about genetically manipulated foods are a few of the results of the potentialities of biotechnology in different fields of society.

An increasing number of artists use plants, cells, genes and other biological material as a medium; others start from eco-installations to remind us of the importance of the environment. George Gessert genetically modifies flowers and defines himself as a facilitator. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignnoneau explore the possibilities of the work of art as a living system, and Karl Sims studies the generative algorithms in his digital plants full of artificial life. Others manage to create a huge commotion like Eduardo Kac and Alba the phosphorescent rabbit he created by crossing it with the GPF gene of the jellyfish. We are talking about genetically manipulated art, a living being which as Kac comments, is born to coexist with others in the heart of its family, the home of Kac the creator, and complete its cycle. In the case of Alba, the Institut Nacional de la Recherche Agronomique, the research laboratory in which Kac’s biologists work, confiscated Alba because of the controversy aroused in the press, in which it was questioned whether it was art or simply an aberration, the product of a perturbed mind. Today Alba is in its home but the debate and controversy go on as more and more artists are working with materials and concepts of biology such as Joe Davis, David Kremmer, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Branon Ballengée, Andrea Zittel, Laurie Stein, Natalie Jeremijenko or Nicola Toffolini, creating hybrid landscapes in which one can eagerly move about.

By the dispossession of the pragmatic function of the life sciences and the recontextualisation of their aesthetic form, we walk along the boundaries between nature and art. But by doing this we are also rethinking or questioning what industry, science and governments also do. What does it mean to alter the natural processes of millions of years of evolution of life? How can we assimilate the fact of bringing into the world a rabbit which shines in the dark? As George Gessert says and does in his creations, today we can reverse Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and proceed to the selection of species following only aesthetic criteria, choosing the flower which seems prettier to us.

In 1934 Edward Steichen already exhibited in MOMA his genetically manipulated delphiniums giving them a drug, colchicine, and therefore by using living materials he was able to “generate his own poetry”, as he himself said. But the breeders of animals or plants have always been the great genetic manipulators who designed new breeds of dogs or more resistant and more beautiful roses to be sold more easily because of their beauty. Today these genetic manipulators are in possession of new mechanisms, new investigations and new capital and can directly alter the genes and generate, for example, headless frogs envisaging headless donors of human organs. The ethical questions surfaced again with renewed energy, as Jeremy Rifkin comments in his book, El Siglo de la Biotecnología.

In some cases we could even say that the role of art and the artist is in danger of being used to legitimatise socially or contribute to the uncritical spread and normalisation of techno-scientific practices which could be considered socially as ethically reprehensible. In these cases the artistic practices only become a brief commentary as a footnote or even the demo version of the new possibilities still to come that lie in wait for us.

Artistic collectives such as the Critical Art Ensemble have already worked widely around the enormous power accumulated in the industries associated with biotechnologies, a real biopower that unravel in their books and actions such as in El culto de la nueva Eva and their project Bio-com. In “Flesh Frontiers” they explain the myths about genetics used to trade with reproductive technologies. To do this they generate a false company of genetic treatments (Bio-com) which generates a critical sub-text that is much more sceptical about the Utopian visions of biotechnologies.

We automatically remember the eugenic plans of Nazi Germany inspired by the ideas of the British Sir Francis Galton, ethnic cleansing in search of a pure race exempt from any element that could be considered a defect with respect to the desired ideal of purity. Even in our imagination, cloning appears as the ideal way to reproduce the best specimens, another form of cleansing and selection. And this idea will continue to be present in an implicit manner in the databases of the genetic profiles of creative people although the word eugenics has disappeared as a result of the Nazi atrocities which carried to the limit the same idea in the search for the pure Arian aesthetic.

If cloning has made it possible to photocopy human beings it has also added to the confusion, already present owing to the digital phenomenon, between original and copy or between individualism and authenticity. The artist Natalie Jeremijenko works with cloning in One Tree, one hundred clones of a single tree which spread out into different cultural areas, planting them in different zones with different climates. In this way, the genetically identical cloned trees make it possible to become aware of the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed throughout time. Trees will be like an instrument in chain for measuring the environmental history of each area, because they can be compared among themselves and the differences can be evaluated.

With regard to the study of abiotic or anthropic forms –those constructed by man– we also find “transgressions” in the landscape which give evidence of the construction of these new landscapes which envelop our existence when we can make them visible. A number of artists have been inspired by the developments coming from geology and geography and have adapted and reformulated new uses of technologies such as virtual reality and increased reality, or the global positioning system (GPS) as well as the entire set of disciplines included under the umbrellas of geomatics: geodesy and navigation, photogrammetry and topography, cartography and systems of geographic information. For example, Masaki Fujihata in Field Work uses GPS to establish a connection between a real space and its topography and the subjective spatial perceptions arranged in the shape of video images in an archive. In this way, a hyperreal space in the shape of steroscopic projection is generated which provides the user with a three-dimensional perspective in which he can move and recall these subjective perceptions accumulated in space.

Programmes such as Vista pro, Bryce, Terragen, Vue’d esprit, Truespace and 3DSmax with its special plug-ins make it possible to create digital landscapes with their mountains, valleys and atmospheric surroundings according to the data of the terrain on which the work is to be done. We may remember, for example, the use made of them by the artist Joan Fontcuberta in his work entitled Securitas: a set of digital landscapes created from data taken from the profiles of the keys of the security doors of some of the most powerful people or places in Spain, keys for state security. And, inversely, by creating a sculptural installation, Fernando Sánchez Castillo in his Simulador de Paisajes reproduces the mountain which was the reason for Adolf Hitler’s aesthetic contemplation, a look of control and submission accumulated in space. In Sandscape, however, Hiroshi Ishii and members of the Tangible Media Group of the MIT create a tactile interface which by using computational simulations tries to facilitate the origin of topographic landscapes in which the landscape projected can be modified by manipulating a real model of sand which redoes the virtual model in function of the interaction between user-creator. A tangible interface to generate projects of digital landscapes in real time.

Others also transform the landscape of seismic data, such as the case of the piece created by Ken Goldberg, Randall Packer, Grez Juhn and Wojciech Matusik. Together they created Mori, an installation where the visitors see images that link together seismic data from Tokyo with the interactions of the user, generating a symphony of low frequency sounds. Or the same transformation of the landscape into a musical score in Landstylus Survey #2 by Calum Stirling, the translation of the shapes of the landscapes into notes that organise a musical score from the data collected in the analysis.

We should also remember the installation Gravicells –Gravity and Resistance by Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa– an installation made of a platform able to capture the movement, speed and weight of its passers-by and convert this information into sound, geometric images and lights. In this way a visual and sound field is constructed which creates a virtual space in which the interactants are able to experiment and visualise the gravity of their bodies in the space and their relation with the other participants-interactants in the experience. A landscape shaped by those using the installation, who in this way create three-dimensional images with the topography of the weights distributed fortuitously in the area of the platform of the installation.

In short, we are talking about imagined, digital, transgressed, modified and hybrid landscapes. We are talking about interactions between art, science and technology in the redefinition of what we understand by landscape and therefore of the different abiotic, biotic and anthropic elements which shape it and which show the way in which we use our humanity and the creation of the culture which shelters us. Starting from this collection of hybrids we can even speculate about the construction in a micro-scale of an architectural work, specially relevant for the history of architecture, about a new spatial conception still troubles our minds. Ken Goldberg and Kart Bohringer had already built Invisible Cantilever, the house of the Waterfall by Frank Lloyd Wright on a micro-scale to explore the epistemological challenges that the nanotechnologies create for us. Is it a question of transgressed nanotechnologies to explore? Perhaps…