Fashioning Landscapes with Bruno Latour’s Immutable Mobiles and Epistemological Matrix or: How We Pass on Knowledge

Abstract

Landscape poetry and art is informed by place and place is understood at least in part by quantitative data about the place. This essay delineates Bruno Latour’s method of understanding how data is gathered in the field and translated into visual and textual images of place (which he calls immutable mobiles). Textual representations reduce the material specificity of place, but in return representations facilitate understanding of a place by creating greater compatibility, standardization, calculation, and circulation of knowledge. Latour explains how instruments create representations and how the instruments and texts are part of a broader implicate epistemological matrix. This matrix determines in advance how we think about, measure, see, and represent the world around us. The essay then develops how landscape poetry and art participate in the broader cultural epistemological matrix.