Seeing Systems and the Beholding Eye: Computer Aided Visions of the Postwar British Landscape

In the decades after World War II—a period that saw the accelerated transformation of Britain’s countryside into a modern industrial landscape—the visual appearance of the country was placed at the center of debates about identity, progress, and heritage. Among a vocal and interested public, the proliferating power stations, power transmission lines, open-pit mines, dams, motorways, and oil-related facilities were often felt as threats to the national past, to cultural values, and to the very idea of what it meant to be British. Amidst this political complexity, the computer-generated diagram, with its underlying mathematical structure, may seem an unlikely vehicle for settling planning disputes about Britain’s countryside. My study reveals how landscape practitioners, hired by industrial developers, began to exploit the general characteristics of mainframe computers (speed, accuracy, replicability, and economy) to define new ways of representing and measuring visual phenomena, and of comparing alternative visions of the country, using quantitative “facts.” The result was a digital technology—seeing systems—that enumerated and quantified rather than depicted visual landscape, a new technology that profoundly transformed not only visualization and representation practices, but that also ensured continued industrial expansion.