“Noise in the Landscape: Disputing the Visibility of Mundane Technological Objects”, 2020-11-10 (; backlinks; similar):
In recent years, a controversy has arisen in Japan regarding an ongoing landscape policy proposing to eliminate the forest of utility poles and electric wires that covers almost all urban and rural landscapes. The controversy is somewhat peculiar vis-à-vis the existing study of landscape, partly because of the utterly ubiquitous and non-monumental characteristics of the poles and partly because of the general apathy in public reaction to them.
Drawing upon diverse academic sources, this interdisciplinary exploration unfolds a complex entanglement of tacit landscape ideas behind the controversy. The author discusses the effectiveness and limits of addressing both the substantial and visual aspects of the poles vis-à-vis the public and policy makers by using three conceptual frameworks: (1) ‘erasure’ in the landscape as palimpsest, (2) the dual aspects of ‘noise’, and (3) artialisation, in order to understand this mundane element of technological objects in the context of creating contemporary landscapes.
…Utility-pole esthetics: In contrast with this rather ghostly genealogy of artialisation, Hideaki Anno, a film director, has maximally explored the esthetic potential of these poles and wires in his works, with his blatant claim for the esthetics of such pole-covered landscapes…Regarding the importance of iconography in formulating landscape ideas (2006; 1988) or artialisation (1997), the audience of Anno’s animation works immediately comprehends the detailed depiction of such technoscapes involving utility poles, wires and high voltage towers in his works, in sharp contrast to the more conventional way of simply omitting these items or using symbols in their place. Ryusuke Hikawa, a film critic, explains that Anno elects to put these elements in the forefront, focusing on their hidden life and history in his sagas.11 Anno has been becoming more outspoken in recent years in defence of the beauty of these poles, probably in response to the no-poles campaign that has become publicly visible. As he said in an interview conducted in 2000:
As I grew up close to a factory, it was my archetypal image. Even now I love such things as factories and masses of iron. I love also utility poles; especially their functional beauty (kinô-bi). I know there’s a movement in political circles to remove these poles. I wonder what motivates them to further impoverish the urban landscape, which has already been so boring. There would be no charm of landscape in Tokyo without utility poles. (emphasis added)12
On another occasion, he reiterates the concept of the functional beauty of these poles:
Utility poles have only functional beauty (kinô-bi). Their concise form exists as uniformity in every city… The disinterestedness of such poles, without any compromise to the general landscape, is something that I adore that is irreplaceable with other things.13
In parallel with Anno’s unique support of the poles’ beauty with his poetic depiction of them in his works, on a Japanese photographic SNS site called Ingrum there is a page dedicated to photos of utility poles with those that are clearly reminiscent of the scenes in Anno’s Evangelion, whose number had reached 107,147 as of late 2018, and the number is still growing.14 Pixiv, another Japanese SNS site for both professional and amateur graphics writers, has a specific category of drawings for utility poles.15 There is even a site for the best drawings of utility-pole related landscapes, with a caption referring to the ‘inorganic beauty of electric wires’, which says, ‘we find these poles everywhere outside, while usually we don’t pay attention to them. Once, however, we attend to them, we are captured by their functional, inorganic beauty.’16 In what is called the Pixiv-Encyclopedia, the entry for utility poles is defined as ’something nostalgic for the Japanese, while their number is decreasing due to the policy of burying them underground’.17
Related to such efforts to reappraise the esthetic value of these poles on the web, there is a site on the web that collects critical comments on the very picture of Mt Fuji covered with utility poles in the photography competition for a No-Poles Landscape mentioned above. There are quite a few comments that underscore that the utility poles that cover the Mt Fuji print actually enhance the beauty of the scenery in the context of modern technology.18