Research in the field of climate change, requires the access to, and knowledge in data of the specific subject. The research we -as graduate students- started off with a general but deep understanding of the changing environment, borders, cultures and landscapes in and around the delta areas surrounding the North Sea. Building up our research through mapping, there was one question that would repeatedly come up; where does the data come from?
Although the question aimed towards the sources upon which the research was done, the question for me went further than that. It became part of my research into the question, What is the source of climate change data?
The first step was to look into the sequence in which we as humans translate the raw data into something we call knowledge. In other words, giving context to raw data and giving meaning to information to create knowledge. Although this is an existing sequence, the concept provides the base upon which I further developed my research. Besides the basic sequence in which raw data is being turned into knowledge or wisdom, I found a similar sequence connecting the natural landscape as we know it, to the digital and immaterial artificial world of data.
German artist and landscape architect Hans Dieter Schaal worked aroud this theme in his 1978 essay and accompanying sketches, Paths and Passages and Spaces. The book is a synthesis of his previous work on continuous spaces and the fluid dynamics between the natural and the artificial. In his book: Paths passages and spaces, he describes one of his drawing as a landscape as ‘a path from a scientific-technical environment to a romantic environment. To me, it establishes a certain relation between ‘nature’ or as Schaal names ‘romantic’ and the artificial environment, as Schaal names it the scientific-technical environment.
First, Second and Third Nature
In Garden Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory, John Dixon Hunt identifies the cultural landscape (agriculture, urban development, roads etc.) with Cicero's 'second nature.' In De natura deorum Cicero wrote "We sow corn, we plant trees, we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers and direct them where we want. In short, by means of our hands we try to create as it were a second nature within the natural world. The second nature is based upon transforming and framing the landscape by the use of physical borders.
" 'First nature' - wilderness - is the realm of the gods, but it is also the raw material for second nature. John Dixon Hunt thinks that Cicero's formulation would have been in the mind of Jacopo Bonfadio when he wrote in 1541 to a fellow humanist that gardens make a 'third nature, which I would not know how to name.' Later in the century, another humanist Bartolomeo Taegio also used the term 'terza natura' or third nature, in describing gardens. The third nature is therefor based upon having total control over nature, in what and how we exhibit nature through the human controlled design of a garden.
Using the concept of the first, second and third nature as an analogy, I am translating the concept of the second nature to the adaptation nature from which we no longer extract agricultural resources, but rather extract data. Secondly, I loop at the third nature no longer as the garden that Cicero describes as the manifestation and exhibition of nature, but rather a curated exhibition of the extracted data. By doing so, I open a new
The Fourth Nature
With the concept of the first second and third nature defined, it arose the question about a possible fourth nature. It is an environment furthest away from the first nature; the natural environment as we know it in the first second or third nature no longer exist. In the fourth nature, it is assumed that every part of the natural environment is translated into the digital environment and therefor, the natural environment is no longer present. It is important to understand that to the inevitable step between the state of the natural environment and the state of the digital environment