Using Adobe Photoshop I layered Friedrich's (1818) Voyageur au-dessus de la mer de nuages, a Google Earth generated image of Garibaldi Mountain region, British Columbia (49.51.20.64N - 122.57.18.09W elev 6026' eye alt 13964) and my del.icio.us/ocean.flynn.
Since I began exploring the cyberworld I have felt a similar vastation experience of infinity that terrified philosopher William James. We don't live in James' world of modernity anymore. In 2006 serious brilliant thinkers present compelling arguments stating that consciousness, including higher consciousness is merely a chemical reaction. Are moral and aesthetic judgments merely chemical?
When in 1818 Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840) painted Voyageur au-dessus de la mer de nuages he was deeply influenced by Goethe and Runge's concepts of colour and Goethe's affirmation that nature was the new Bible. Friedrich rejected the art of Greek and Roman antiquity based on fables and fantasy which placed the gods in an unattainable sublime world. Friedrich preferred Nordic legends where humans retained their humanity in a natural world. Art could mediate between man and nature. He echoed Schelling's concept of the artist who could reveal the secrets of the universe that were hidden in nature. Art could bring the sublime to man by revealing the power of nature that was both beautiful and terrifying, familiar and strange. Confronted with the vastation of infinity revealed in nature man can lose himself in God. The belief in the omnipresence of God was adopted by the Romantics as a form of pantheism. God was present in a grain of sand. Nature itself was the New Bible, the Sacred Book through which the infinite could be known by man. Landscape painting was elevated by the Romantic artists to the highest order of painting. Through landscape painting the Romantic artist could present the Sublime. (It was considered to be among the lower forms of painting with the historical painting of the academics like Benjamin West being the highest.)
This is also uploaded to photoblog
ictchamp added this photo to their favorites. (72 months ago)
zanzo 77 months ago | reply
I'm inspired! Thank you.
A brief trip on my serendipitous route to your photo and my revelation:
Start at this paper on Folksonomies and then follow it to Flickr for a search on the tag: flicktion.
Scrolling down, I came to your photo above. Transfixed by the tag-cloud superimposed over a Google Earth snapshot, I recalled my own love of viewing my favorite places on Google Earth.
I've posted a few google shots with folksonomies related to the stories they tell. Check 'em out at my flickr page and let me know what you think.