The Lay of the Land
Winter 2024, #47
If you do name something, as soon as you name something, then you destroy its reality. So that as soon as you’re, like, named at birth, you’re already, like, wiped out. - Robert Smithson
Editor’s Note
Welcome to this newsletter, our 47th. It covers CLUI projects and programs over the last year, which share a theme of confluence, perhaps the most fundamental landscape metaphor. Confluence is where journeys from remote and disparate origins merge, and continue, roiling and mingled. The growing flow creates and destroys the terrain it passes through, sustaining life, and catastrophe. Bound to the conveyor of gravity and time, we make note along the way, pointing things out, posting signs, sharing the experience, trying to understand as we pass by, before we are all swept out to sea, or evaporate into the sky. Until that happens, though, we are glad you are there, dear reader, headed downstream with us on this curious raft, the latest edition of the Lay of the Land.