Landing with Distortion

Abstract

Landing with Distortion extends Landing, a transdisciplinary research practice that understands design as a situated practice of care with mountain landscapes. Rooted in landscape and artistic research, it develops a relational and performative methodology in which knowledge emerges through embodied intra-actions between bodies, sites, and materials.

While embodiment has been central—enacted through repeated encounters with the site—this work examines what becomes of this knowledge when direct bodily presence is not possible. It argues that absence is not a loss of relation, but a condition through which relations persist and are reconfigured across time.

To engage this condition, the research works with alpine webcam images, focusing on moments of interference where images destabilize their representational function and register atmospheric and material processes. These interruptions become constitutive of the method, and distortion operates as an epistemic condition through which knowledge is produced through translation across distributed relations.

Keywords: absence, distortion, embodied knowledge, mediation, landscape