ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the intertwined relationship between field theories and the aerial view, placing Roy Ascott’s work in the context of countercultural interests in mapping, charting and ‘reading’ the landscape, as well as exploring his subsequent interest in tables and the horizontal plane of human communication. Over the course of the twentieth century, the term field became cross-disciplinary, used to denote open spaces of exchange. Its original geographical meaning of a large tract of open and flat land translated to a conceptual zone of interaction, involving information, ideas, languages, cultures or behaviours. Ascott intended his field theory to be a theoretical model for postmodernist visual art practices, in which the artwork was a start point rather than end point, and in which, with an echo of Barthes, the viewer ultimately held the power of attributing meaning. Many cybernetic artists, including Ascott, pursued something else — the extended reach of the mind and the abstraction of communication into an information field.
