Forecasting the CountercultureMany people desire to think of themselves as open-minded and tolerant. But where did this desire come from? Traditionally associated with the counterculture and visionary 1960s, the free and liberal individual is believed to originate from be-ins, happenings, rock concerts, and radical LSD-inspired events that engendered a new authentic, collective, and egalitarian being. How alarming it is to then learn that these associations are in fact half-baked mythologies.Fortunately, Stanford University Professor Fred Turner addresses this problematic misconception in our cultural and historical knowledge in his most recent book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (2013), a prequel to his From Counterculture into Cyberculture (2006).

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If the cliché about garbage – ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ – is true, its inverse, unfortunately, is not. Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and representation. Focusing on historical and contemporary landscape photography, the article questions whether data visualization trends, particularly those that attempt to visualize the post-industrial consumer landscape, help or hinder our capacity to understand our environment, and possibly even ecological endeavors. The article charts the history of photography’s landscape genre, mapping the contours of a shift from the classical ‘nature’ aesthetic, to an industrial, post-industrial, and eventually a mathematical aesthetic contingent on emergent techniques and data visualization in the attempt to depict ever amassing magnitudes of environmental despoliation.