Encountering Landscape: Travel as Method

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a world of acceleration and consumption, where the small screen often has greater appeal than the real world, society is becoming increasingly detached from the landscape and the places within it. Yet ‘modernity is society on the move’, and in an increasingly mobile world, travel provides new opportunities for distinct types of encounter. Based on the pace, rhythms and rituals of each, this paper examines how different modes of transport afford distinct opportunities for travellers to see and read the landscape and to better understand the processes of change that have shaped what we see today. In this paper we explore these distinct opportunities, presenting the idea of travel as a methodology that affords unique and significant ways of documenting and understanding landscape, and in particular its character and its dynamism.