Glossary

• Aesthetic
  • (adj) Concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty
  • (noun) The set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement
• Analogous
  • comparable in certain respects, typically in a way which makes clearer the nature of the things compared
• Androcentric
  • focused on men
• Atavistic
  • Habitual behaviour occurring from primitive origins, not by conscious decision or due to modern necessity
• Axiomatic
  • obviously true and therefore not needing to be proved
• Bioremediation
  • Metabolic processes by which microorganisms, plants, fungi or algae degrade pollutants or reduce their ecological availability.
• Catastrophic Shift
  • A sudden dramatic change in state (of an ecosystem), often exacerbated by a loss of resilience
  • Catalysts can include human intereference
• Chattering
  • Local word for white marks found on shingle pebbles at Rye Harbour
• Climax Vegetation
  • The dominant plant species at the end of a phase of plant succession that reaches a state of ecological equilibrium appropriate to the climate experienced there
• Contiguous
  • sharing a common border
  • there is an overlap in philosophy here with issues such as gender theory – promoting a spectrum rather than division
• Counter-pastoral
  • lauded the city life and created an imaginary Arcadia within urban life, and lamented the loss of the rural pastoral
• Criticality
  • The quality of being of the highest importance
• Décollage
  • a French word meaning literally to unstick
  • generally associated with a process used by artists of the nouveau réalisme (new realism) movement that involved making art from posters ripped from walls
  • uncovers or reveals history behind or making of the work
  • in some way this is what I am doing with landscape
• Determinate
  • Having exact and discernible limits or form
• Diagenesis
  • the sum of all processes, chiefly chemical, by which changes in a sediment are brought about after its deposition but before its final lithification(conversion to rock)
• Didactic
  • Intended to teach
  • Particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive
• Discursive Strategies
  • The linguistic resources to which the speaker/writer resorts to maximise the effectiveness of the message
• Emergent Property
  • a property of a complex system that its individual constituents do not have
• Epigone
  • a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher
• Eremozoic
  • term coined by biologist and writer E. O. Wilson to describe the current era of mass extinction triggered by human activity
• Evanescence
  • the condition of lasting only for a short time, then disappearing quickly and being forgotten
• Fabrication
  • the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something
  • an invention; a lie
• Geographical Imagination
  • the mechanism by which poeple come to know the world and situate themselves in time and space
• Gestalt Psychology
  • Humans see patterns not components
  • The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
• Gynocentric
  • focused on women
• Haptic
  • relating to the sense of touch
• Hauntology
  • a portmanteau of “haunting” and “ontology”
  • a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost
  • Derrida?
• Heteroglossia
  • the presence of two or more diverse viewpoints in a text or other artistic work
• Hyperreality
  • The generation by models of a real with origin or reality (as defined by Baudrillard)
  • an image or simulation, or an aggregate of images and simulations, that either distorts the reality it purports to depict or does not in fact depict anything with a real existence at all, but which nonetheless comes to constitute reality – note this is interesting because it interchanges image and simulation while for Baudrillard representation and simulation are opposing systems
• Iconography
  • the theoretical and historical study of symbolic imagery 
• Ideate
  • form an idea of
  • imagine or conceive
• Immanence
  • the state of being present as a natural and permanent part of something
• Imperialism
  • the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas, often through employing hard power, but also soft power
• Latent Space
  • An abstract, multi-dimensional space that encodes a meaningful internal representation of externally observed events. Samples that are similar in the external world are positioned close to each other in the latent space.
• Liminal
  • relating to a transitional stage
  • occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary
• Littoral
  • Related to or situated on the shore of a sea or lake
• Littoral Drift
  • Also known as Longshore Drift
  • the longshore transport of material, under the action of waves and currents
• Low Drone
  • also known as a high tripod, the use of a drone relatively low in the sky to make an aerial view as if using an extended tripod
• Mast Year
  • Every few years, some species of trees and shrubs produce a bumper crop of their fruits or nuts. The collective term for these fruits and nuts is ‘mast’, so a heavy cropping year is called a mast year.
  • Mast years are set in advance by deciduous trees, not every year, to reduce potential seed foragers before releasing a bumper crop against a smaller predatory population.
• Metaverse
  • a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets
• Metonym
  • a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated
• Misanthropic
  • having or showing a dislike of other people; antisocial
• Ontology
  • the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being
  • the science of the kinds and structures of objects
• Palimpsest
  • something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form
  • something such as a work of art that has many levels of meaning, types of style, etc. that build on each other
• Pastoral (note the development of a theme even within the dictionary definition)
  • pertaining to the country or to life in the country; rural; rustic
  • having the simplicity, charm, serenity, or other characteristics generally attributed to rural areas
  • portraying or suggesting idyllically the life of shepherds or of the country, as a work of literature, art, or music
• PLA
  • Polylactic Acid
  • a plant-based biodegradable material
  • The sugar from a starter material such as corn starch is fermented to create lactic acid
  • PLA is then formed by the ring-opening polymerisation of this lactide with a metal catalysts acting in a solution or as a suspension
  • As production is relatively low-energy PLA is considered reasonably environmentally-friendly if disposed of correctly
• Phenomenology
  • the philisophical study of the structures of experience
• Polysemous
  • having multiple meanings
• Precession of Simulacra
  • After Baudrillard, reality i.e. the territory becomes preceded and determined by the map which originally represented it
  • There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation – there is only the simulacrum
• Promethianism
  • An environmental orientation which perceives the Earth as a resource whose utility is determined primarily by human needs and interests and whose environmental problems are overcome through human innovation.
• Psyche
  • The totality of the mind, conscious and unconscious (psychology)
  • The human soul, mind or spirit (general/mythological)
• Recombinant ecology
  • The study of ecosystems comprising novel plant and animal associations that have been induced or created by people deliberately, inadvertently or indirectly
• Reification
  • The act of treating something abstract as if it were real
  • (computer science) The creation of a data model
• Revetments
  • structures used in stream restoration, river engineering or coastal engineering, placed on banks or cliffs in such a way as to absorb the energy of incoming water. River or coastal revetments are usually built to preserve the existing uses of the shoreline and to protect the slope, as a defense against erosion.
• Riparian
  • The riparian zone is the interface between land and a river or stream
  • Riparian is also the proper nomenclature for one of the terrestrial biomes of the Earth
• Scopic
  • Visual
• Skumerie
  • Semi-licensed piracy from ports such as Rye in the Dark Ages
• Shifting Baseline Syndrome
  • a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition
• Solargraph
  • A photograph of the paths of the Sun across the sky created with pinhole photography
• Toponomy
  • the study of place names
• Topophilia
  • place love
• Transient
  • lasting only for a short time; impermanent
  • how long this time is could be a key question – for humans it might be hours, minutes, or seconds, for the environment it could be years, decades, millenia…
• Trace
  • a mark, token, or evidence of the former presence, existence or action of something; a vestige
  • “A path is a trace, so a photo of such a path is a trace of a trace” (Campany, 2011) At: https://davidcampany.com/traces-and-pictures/ (Accessed 27.5.2022)
• Trope
  • a significant or recurrent theme; a motif.
• Trummerfotographie
  • Rubble or wreckage photography
  • Originally used to describe images of bombed cities such as Dresden
• Vernacular
  • A widely-used term which seems to have different meanings depending on the context
  • For photography, generally it means everyday or domestic, and may be used to distinguish the style from fine art photography (of course this can then be appropriated and developed by the artist…)