From Topography to Topology

This illustrated book chapter takes as its subject matter a coastal site in southern Britain (Dungeness) which is a Nature Reserve, a place of Special Scientific Interest, and is also heavily marked by the exploitation of its natural resources. The chapter outlines how the generation of digital images as part of a processual, embodied and situated practice can produce place as an entangled and diffracted entity. Image emerges out of this process not as static topography (as a laying out of ground) but as dynamic topology (as transformation), a continuous material morphing. This process produces not image of place, but image as place and place as image. Such a reworking of the concept of ‘landscape’ involves the human as one element the world passes through, rather than as someone who passes through the world, thereby questioning anthropocentric privilege.