The Post-Digital Picturesque: Sinister Dishevelment?

Abstract

Sidney K. Robinson’s 1988 essay, The Picturesque: Sinister Dishevelment, critically reframes the English Picturesque through the social and political implications of compositional strategies and mechanisms used for landscape design. Most critically, Robinson identifies sinister qualities of the Picturesque in the hidden power, or power in reserve, that gentlemanly landscape designers used to create scenes in the landscape that only they could discern as having been either labored upon or the result of natural decay. Today some post-digital practices have continued the digital project in a picturesque mode similar to these historic landscape designers. These designers and practices obscure authorial labor in their work with simulations of disorder or material decay. Labor that was evident and abundant in designs of earlier digital work is rendered ambiguous. Viewers are left unsure if the computer-simulated these scenes using computational physics or if a person has directly authored the digital model or image. Computational power is intentionally rendered ambiguous. For these practices, digital expertise and labor have continued, but it is not clear where the computer’s agency stops and starts in the design process. The labor required to produce this sort of work appears indiscernible to all but the expert viewer when, in fact, the practices spared no effort in creating the appearance of a casual lack of labor. Only those knowledgeable of the post-digital techniques used to generate this work can discern where labor has been applied, creating a novel form of sinister dishevelment. Today’s post-digital picturesque does not protect an aristocratic elite as those of the 18th century did with parlor talk but continues the digital project with intentionally limited discourse while sidestepping its excess. The reuse of Sidney Robinson’s essay and a comparison to alternative post-digital practices provides a lens to understand these post-digital picturesque practices and the implications of concealing the indexes of labor.