Rocksect: Profiling site processes through translation of deep fieldwork in the fluid margins of land/water

Rocksect expands a collaborative landscape architectural research that aims to develop a method for capturing site qualities through deep fieldwork-based empirical enquiry and interpretation. The authors regard this method as a critical component of the conceptual design act. Their journeys are termed ‘travelling transects’ and nurture a concept that conveys both a scientific regard – the transect – and a more ephemeral condition of movement across time and place – the travel. Its theoretical foundation relies on a reinterpretation of Alexander von Humboldt’s transareal and mobile empirical science. Over the past years the authors have conducted several travelling transects in Europe and Australia that have enabled formulation of research questions that both sharpen their methodological framework and reveal gaps to be further explored, geographically and conceptually. Rocksect translates the findings of their September 2014 transect travel to two Australian sites, the rocky coasts between Sydney and Newcastle, and the arid outback around Oratunga in the Flinders Ranges. Here, they studied natural rock pools, made accessible to humans, as perhaps disappearing examples of human intervention at the critical edge between nature and culture. Rocksect maps the tangible and intangible processes of the continuous remaking of these rock pools by natural and human forces. It takes a transareal perspective on surface materiality in order to fashion an ecology of representation that is both spatial and textual in the form of an ordered archive or tableau.