I. When I saw a room full of Pratt students open their browsers wide, I understood the typical computer-window would not be Macintosh default width. No, the screen format would be rectangular--wider than long. This struck me as psychologically cogent. The "page" would be scenic--from a visual arts standpoint, less akin to the still life or portrait and more akin to the landscape.

II. At the recreated cave of Lascaux, visitors gain perspective as they are surrounded by a "hunt" scene. In virtual reality, the computer circles an object or environment to provide a panoply. Horizontal scrolling causes nausea, yet enhances scope. Scrolling downward allows a world to unfold with less peripheral vision involved. Quite different experiences--the scenic versus the unfolding--and both have charms. One revealed, one hidden. Scrolling of any kind is a process of discovery. The size of the segment scrolled is also relevant. Scrolling a long narrow strip to the right can be like pulling a message from a bottle--an intimate experience.

III. Gertrude Stein in Lectures in America discusses the problem of plays and emotion. Audience member's emotions are always asynchronous with the play's action. When one sees a landscape one takes it in all at once. Stein: "I felt if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of the person looking on at the play being behind or ahead of the play because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance." The landscape features things in relation: the trees to the hills, hills to fields, trees to each other. Her opera Four Saints in Three Acts was written as a landscape.

IV. Henri Rousseau wanted to join the genres of landscape and portrait. One result was "The Dream," a painting of a nude woman reclining on a couch with the jungle encroaching and a man in the background playing flute. After determining salient characteristics of a genre, it is often easy and exciting to work with those reductions--to fuse various genres. I'm a non-purist, but I admire purists who identify the essence of mediums or genres.

V. In my first book Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape, the title piece refers to the war-torn area of Daytona Beach where religious and "sin-city" interests wage ad campaigns to save or debauch souls. As a result the landscape has suffered degradation. The insertion of nude figures was my counter for an area increasingly the pawn of those with no respect for the natural environment.

VI. If people are dressed and the land is natural--is that an imbalance, similar to the oft-noted male-dressed, female-undressed phenomenon? What is the relationship of humans to the land and what is the relative importance of each in the vision of the artist or observer. The cover of Leslie Scalapino's book The Return of Painting features an oceanside landscape with tiny figures. This is provocative not due to its dramatic composition but to the assigned weight in the figure-ground relationship.

VII. Rose Lowder, experimental French filmmaker, captures moving landscapes/scenes. Her "Quidproquo" documents the intersection of nature and industrial technology. Often she films with a stationary camera, and the landscape's action is due to the wind, changes in light, and frame by frame editing. In a similar vein, Suzanne Giroux, Canadian videographer, set up her camera in Monet's gardens and taped "video-paintings"--a remake of scenes the impressionist had painted. The work of these two artists pre-dates the spate of live cam shots now speckling the Web.

VIII. Pacwan, a French Internet server for Aix-en-Provence, is preparing a camcorder site for St. Victoire. Meanwhile, a WebMuseum page has been devoted to Cezanne's paintings of this mountain. My father painted landscapes of the Georgia seacoast and the north Georgia mountains while my mother painted still lifes. Audrey Flack in Art and Soul reviews various artists' preferred focus and scale. Choosing a scenic genre could indicate an inclusive/concerned view or a wish to enter the world. Choosing the Web interface demands an extending into the "world;" it also evinces a size and format preference. How big can an image of the land be on the typical screen? Limitations are present but different for each medium.

IX. In recent years, the term "landscape" has been appropriated by physicists and mathematicians--sometimes in a traditional sense as when applied to a fractal-generated computer landscape, such as Pi-landscapes, other times to reference grandeur, scope, magnitude. In Mapping the Next Millennium section headings include "Planetary Landscapes" and "The Animate Landscape." Gleick in Chaos speaks of how achievements in physics--from atom bomb to transistor--have "changed the twentieth century landscape."