NT Landscapes Research: Visualizing the Governing Gaze

To make something visible is a powerful act. The governing gaze, as Foucauldian researchers and STS scholars have taught us, changes those that are gazed upon, people, cattle, microbes alike. But how do those that are gazed upon affect the governing gaze? The aim of this paper is to address this question by contrasting several depictions of the Elbe river near Dresden, Germany. The first set of depictions are two landscape paintings from the early 19th century, which are parts of Bruno Latour and his colleagues' recent exhibition 'Reset Modernity' (Latour et al. 2016). While almost identical, the two paintings illustrate a subtle shift in the perception of nature - a shift towards 'mechanical objectivity' (Daston & Gallison 2008). The second set of depictions - a photograph and a drawing - are drawn from field notes generated over the course of our ongoing research project 'Landscapes of Democracy'. Based on our joint fieldwork in Germany and the Northern Territory in Australia, we treat these two sets of depictions not as different representations of the same place, or as related representations of different places, but as performances that generate different ways of seeing.