#tool test

On a political level these "natures" remain heavily debated as ideologies that are stabilized and destabilized by social power relations. How a particular landscape actually reflects the way users also define themselves hints to the complexities involved Ecological studies of interest to our approach therefore include landscapes as shareholders of many conflicting economies. Cultural narcissism, as Christopher Lasch emphasised for consumer culture, is one one of them. The focus we are therefore particularly interested in is how popular culture plays in to these economies, ideologies and spheres of environmental use and identification in everyday life. How are our environments produced and what does our experience of them rely on? What are most contemporary landscape-natures made up of, who are their stakeholders and what are their means of design?

The starting point we chose to explore these questions were our favored relationships to landscapes. The first assignment we followed in our workshop Nr 01 was to build a landscape design practice dedicated to explore this relationship and to develop designs for by using narrative tools that we introduced them to in the beginning.

The second assignment was to participate in Steve Rowell's practice of land use interpretation and develop a landmark for the first successful teleportation experiment outside a laboratory executed under the Danube in Vienna 2004 by the Austrian Institute of Quantum Physics.

Methodically the first workshop featured a bottom up approach  that challenged students to explore the narrative topography that their own spatial experience was constructed by.

The "bottom up" approach describes the course of exploration. At the beginning students did not necessarily know what larger cultural contexts and debates their given landscape attraction was participating in. Identifying them as the terrain they could script their practice, role and mission in for target audiences was our goal. 

Methodically the second workshop could be described as "top down approach". Context and debates were provided and opened for workshop participation. Challenging landscape relations implicit in the practice of quantum physics however had to be appropriated by the students to realize speculatively comprehendable deep time landmark designs for future generations.

In both cases narratives were applied to develop contextual settings for creative acts using varrying explorative strategies within a narrative topography.