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[RRE]Virtual Landscapes

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[I have heavily reformatted the enclosed message, so blame me for any misplaced paragraph breaks or other problems. This paper was written to be presented as a talk with slides, and many of the missing images can be found in the author's book, "Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles" (Cambridge University Press, 1997).]

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Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:31:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Chandra Mukerji

Virtual Landscapes

Chandra Mukerji UC San Diego

ICA Meetings, SF, 1999

It is now commonplace to hear that computers have provided contemporary users with a range of virtual landscapes in which to act (or opt) out of time and place, and become other than one's self (or usual selves). The thought is enormously attractive; computer-based landscapes (or web sites) seem to proliferate; and people more frequently describe themselves as living mostly on the web. But if you go to the offices or rooms of web citizens, you find them not in electronic landscapes but familiar kinds of built environments, surrounded by computer parts, specially designed keyboards, mousepads, chairs, and desks. They may forget their bodies for a while, but then they soon have to buy special ergonomic workstations and chairs to re-accommodate the needs of their bodies as well as their imaginations. These material places and corporeal bodies are supposed to be figments of worlds and selves that true computer geeks have left "behind". But there they are -- forgotten but not gone. The mind-body split of Descartes was intended to be conceptual, not a way of life. He wanted truth, not existence without body or place. Imagining the mind set free of material constraints is not an inheritance of the Enlightenment -- as many suppose -- but a conceit of the 20th C that deserves some unpacking and critical assessment as a cultural aspiration.

To get to this point, we need to look more closely at some of the claims about virtual landscapes. There are two languages used to describe their relations to computers. One presents such landscapes as fictional places, which support non-ordinary realities, identities, and actions. In this conception, electronic landscapes are like the spaces in plays, movies, novels, which are products of imagination and free the mind to re-narrate human experience. The other defines virtual realities as immaterial, conceptural places, which due to the essential properties of the electronic medium necessarily free us from the tyranny of time, place, and self. The first uses a constructivist paradigm, full of agency and action, in which human creativity opens up new contexts for living; using computers, people make places in which to act and remake themselves. The second is a structuralist, technological argument. The medium is the message; the computer itself disrupts traditional spatial and body relations, allowing users to question the properties of person and place, and encouraging enthusiasts to design more technological disruptions of social relations.

What I want to do in this paper is explore the relationship between these two arguments, using a constructivist approach to query the structural one. I get to the constructivist perspective from the assumption that people have to make a medium as well as a message, and so if a technology has qualities, they are ones that have been designed into the machinery or software. This does not imply that all the features are intended; they can result from a combination of unarticulated cultural assumptions and technological limits. But this approach does imply that any reduction of virtual landscapes to the medium itself (the structuralist move) is a moment of mystification. It is a naturalization of a cultural choice, and easily becomes a way to mask the cultural stakes.

If we want instead to recognize the cultural stakes and denaturalize the 20th-century elaboration of virtual landscapes, we need to think more historically about how virtual realities have been designed and mobilized in the past. It is silly to assume this is an entirely new cultural formation. And once you begin to ask where our ideas about virtual realities come from, we have to admit that we live in a world saturated with them -- plays, films, novels, short stories, even radio shows like the "War of the Worlds". There are other less obvious ones like the diaramas in 19th-century natural history museums, depicting pre-historic lands that were designed entirely from the imaginations of scientists, but were presented as windows on the past. These fictions have all been instrumental to the construction of facts about social processes, cultural values, and scientific thought; they are (like computer images) good to think with in part because they are virtual realities that allow us to query ordinary reality. Virtual realities may be in fact universal to all cultures -- if all story-telling or mythology belongs to them -- but what about virtual spaces? Aren't they new? Not really. Take the example of the Gothic Cathedral.

This was not just a kind of Church building, but a place to retreat from normal life. It was where heaven met earth inside a soaring structure of delicately carved stone, brilliant colored glass, and echoing sounds. But virtual landscapes, they must be new. Right?

In monasteries as well as Churches in Europe during the late Middle Ages, cloistered gardens provided idyllic landscapes where Eden was "restored". These were not just quiet sites for reflection, but places where clerics could collect the plants that constitued Creation. They would sow seeds and plant bulbs to make a grassy mead, which reproduced in spirit as well as plant culture the birth of Eden. Both Cathedrals and these Biblically-inspired gardens were built environments -- virtual spaces to contemplate those forces not immediately visible on earth. They were real and very material constructs -- in fact in themselves (and for their periods) feats of science and engineering (like a computer). But the point of their existence was to take people out of ordinary life, and place them in a spiritual world more perfect and divine than anything on earth, where they could find their spiritual natures and become other than themselves. These were virtual spaces, constructed worlds to support non-ordinary action; they mediated between the imagined and material, allowing people to transcend their earthly limitations and become more ethereal, spiritually located beings. Virtual environments, in these cases, were obviously used to hasten the development of those kinds of human actors required or desired for an historical regime. And they raise questions about what virtual landscapes are doing in the present, pointing to a pattern of place- making and power that is not clear, but seems historically consequential.

If you think about it, there are many theories of power and culture begin with the work of virtual realities. They focus on the liminal space imagination and experience, where social meanings make common sense of human sense impressions. Ideology is meant to control perception; simulacra to replace it; and hegemony to give a coherent and acceptable political meaning to experience. Virtual realities have a powerful role in these. "Triumph of the Will" defines Hitler and the Nazis as a common good for Germany (ideology); newspapers present words as good enough political tools to replace direct action and experience (simulacra); and living in suburban affluence masks the political stakes of that lifestyle (hegemony).

The landscape is particularly important for hegemonic political regimes, since part of the power of the hegemony is that it makes political order seem natural or inevitable. A cityscape, for example, as a site in which human will is visibly imposed on the material order of things, makes particularly manifest those groups or institutions with the power to shape the world. Great buildings for a social order like colliseums, banks, mansions, or cathedrals, for that matter, make the groups that erect them seem too imposing to oppose politically, and capable of doing important and maybe even wonderful things. Hegemonic orders must constitute a life world in order to make a regime seem legitimate; and some of this world must be located in the landscape to be convincing. Virtual spaces can also help make the power of regimes appear seamless and natural as long as they can hide those parts of life which might contradict or undermine the system of order. The great English gardens of the 18th-19th centuries, with their idyllic green lawns, meandering ponds, and peaceful vistas, might have seemed entirely natural, but they imposed an order on the countryside to reproduce social relations of power. Some were constructed using fortunes accumulated from colonial enterprises and (more surprisingly) others were made physically from the waste materials of factories. They depicted a model of perfectly natural order that could only be sustained by remaining ignorant of the social worlds that made them possible. But those who entered these virtual spaces, suspending disbelief, could subscribe to a world that seemed both orderly and natural at the same time.

To understand better relations between virtual landscapes and modern political order let us move to 17th-century France -- the historical moment that most historians identify with the birth of the modern state. This is when Jean-Baptiste Colbert became the architect of France's state bureaucracy, and Louis XIV and Louvois mobilized the first professional army to delineate and defend France as a territorial state. This is also approximately when, as James Scott has argued, people in the modern West learned to see like a state -- to make surveillance of person and place habitual to power. Although it is often left out of the story, this new state was importantly virtual and territorial. It was a place of power as well as a system of administration; the state of France was necessarily a conceptual space as well as a natural one, where people and natural resources were aligned to achieve extraordinary powers. People who traditionally thought of themselves as Burgundian or from Languedoc now found themselves in France -- subject to French laws, taxes, andmilitary conscription. In this place of power, all those who inhabited the landscape were part of a political regime. This could only be accomplished if territorial France was a virtual as well as material place -- one importantly named and politically defined. This territorial France was novel enough as a political location that its existence and powers had to be made visible as well as consequential. To close down its potential definition as a contested space, France was frequently presented as a fact on maps, coins, and printed tracts of propaganda.

Most importantly for our purposes, France as a virtual place was naturalized and presented as a landscape in the royal gardens at Versailles. As I demonstrated in my book on Versailles, territorial France was miniaturized in the gardens, demonstrated there as an engineering feat to foreign dignitaries, and naturalized by its beauty. I want to take you to this unnatural (or virtual) landscape today to make the point that people in the West have from the beginning of state formation engineered virtual landscapes to sustain and naturalize political power, and that this pattern continues in contemporary computer-based virtual realities. Let me begin by introducing the garden.

The park at Versailles was in its period an engineering marvel and aesthetic tour de force. Whole towns were torn down and cemetaries dug up to make a space large enough to represent the glory of France in the reign of the Sun King. The topography of the garden itself was engineered, using the tools of fortress construction simultaneously being employed to mark French territorial reach with a string of fortress cities.

Year after year thousands of fully-grown trees and tens of thousands of small trees were transplanted from nearby mountains to make the "forest" rooms in the gardens densely green and flourishing. It took the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers to build a water supply large enough for the park. It required as well the expertise of engineers from Paris to design the pipes and pumps that made the elaborate fountains jump and sparkle with spray, when the king wanted it. It also entailed the work of myriad students at the French Academy in Rome to provide enough "Classical" statuary for the gardens and chateau. (Colbert didn't want to pay full price for Ancient statues, so he ordered these "knock-offs" from the students.) For similar fiscal reasons, Colbert even set up a bulb nursery in Toulon, on the Mediterranean, to supply adequate numbers of spring flowers for the garden beds near the chateau. The gardens at Versailles were not natural landscapes, but spaces in which natural materials were used to constitute a virtual reality -- a geopolitical claim about place and power.

For political purposes, the park at Versailles had formal, unnatural qualities that were highlighted rather than hidden. In this garden, nature was not left free, but rather flourished under the visible control of the Sun King. It was meant to be a model of orderliness imposed on the land, associating land control through engineering with the natural order of things. Impotantly, this garden not only symbolized the powers of the Sun King, but demonstrated the material forms of political power being developed during this reign. Techniques of fortress, road, and water- system construction -- used elsewhere to articulate French territory and to make use of France's natural resources -- were reappropriated here in seductively beautiful forms.

In this virtual landscape (like the ideal-typical computer one), people were supposed to be able to transform themselves into beings more powerful than themselves. During royal fetes and divertissemens, the nobles at court were dressed in costume and given roles to play in elaborate narratives or a loosely associated series of concerts, plays, jousts, and meals. During the early fetes, when narrative orders were most in force, the participants even took on particular roles in stories that unfolded over a period of days. The playwright Moliere helped to script the events, and participants read or recited their parts aloud. Even in the later parties, which lasted only a single day and had no overarching narrative line, required that the nobles dress in costume, walking the gardens dressed as classical heroes, forces of nature, or pagan deities. These parties were plays of power in which the "natural" superiority of the nobility was enacted in the virtual land of the Sun King. We can see in these moments that the virtual reality of the gardens was indeed a place where new identities were played out, and personal transformations were ritually enacted and achieved.

Even on ordinary days, a walk in the garden encouraged play with power, if not a play of power. Some of the garden rooms, containing miniature fortress-like structures, allowed courtiers to "walk the ramparts" and enact their social rank as descendents of feudal knights.

The Labyrinthe contained fountains with stories from Aesop's Fables, which described a natural hierarchy of animals with not-too-surprising counterparts to the social hierarchy in France. To run through this maze-like garden and see the stories illustrated there was an act of political education. The labyrinth as a form (used on Church floors, for example) was meant to suggest how human beings passed through life -- in ignorance of the higher order constraining their actions. Church labyrinths from the late Middle Ages were laid out to remind people that they could never completely understand God's actions in their lives. The garden labyrinth at Versailles was a reminder that there were natural hierarchies beyond the control of ordinary men -- including the rightful rule of the Sun King, Louis XIV. (With this in mind, one has to ask what is at stake in the myriad computer games today based on labyrinths, but we will return to this.)

The gardens at Versailles, then, helped to naturalize a regime of power. Importantly, what was naturalized there was both a presence and an absence. Something vital was left out of the surface symbolism of the gardens -- a silence or mystification that was essential to the ideological effects.

The wealth of France was celebrated in fetes and divertissemens, but the sources of French wealth were not made manifest in the gardens. The fountains and flower gardens presented showy displays, but they seemed reflections of the power and magnificence of the regime, not results of innovations in the techologies and techniques of the world of commerce. Evidence of commercial influences on this place of power were systematically masked or hidden. Why?

Louis XIV's state-based absolutism was in part a way to reduce the political influence of the bourgeosie -- particuarly commercial Protestantism -- on French life. The territorial state was presented (in propaganda as well as the gardens) as a militarily- defined space that depended for its success on the nobility, not the bourgeoisie. With the professional army, nobles were in fact less autonomous military actors than they had been, but they remained deeply invested in this traditional definition of their rank. So, highlighting the military role in French power was integral to the new political relations under absolutism. No wonder, then, the royal gardens at Versailles, which celebrated their military referents and disguised the sources of new wealth, seemed a better representation of the French state and its elites than Italian Renaissance gardens, which seemed often only collector's gardens -- displays of taste and a product of trade.

Showing (from early in his regime) a contempt for or anxiety about commercial life, Louis XIV kept his court out of Paris, France's commercial center, and kept the bourgeosie out of his gardens. When he claimed that he was restoring the nobility to its former and proper place of power within the social hierarchy, he explicitly took the reigns of power away from the clergy by ousting Cardinal Mazarin. But he also signaled a decline of bourgeois influence over his court, too, where Mazarin had exercised his authority with the cooperation and blessing of the bourgeoisie. As capitalism had been enriching the financiers and merchants in Paris, nobles who could not engage in trade without losing their noble privileges -- like freedom from taxes -- lost some of their power base. The growing importance of commerce was a threat to their social station. The shift from a land-based to a money-based economy was making landholding and estate management --traditional noble activities -- more demanding. At Versailles, these forces that seemed to threaten the "natural" hierarchy of noble political control were hidden. The water engineers from Paris who built the early supplies for Versailles placed their pumps and holding tanks outside the walls of the gardens, where they would not be immediately visible to those touring the grounds. The kitchen garden, which was in fact model of the application of market gardening techniques from Paris to fruit and vegetable production for the court, was set out in the form of a fortress with miniature battlement-type walls around the outside. In this odd structure, visitors could review the trees and plants below like generals reviewing their troops in a fortification. The technical successes of market gardening made the king's table a marvel, but the place that produced the rare or early fruits and vebetables was dressed up as a place for descendents of medieval knights -- nobles. Productive France was surrounded and surveyed by the feudal-style military elites and their military structures. The keeper of the kitchen garden, Jean de la Quintinie endeared himself to the Sun King for publically eschewing commercial values. Rather than selling the excess produce from the garden, he gave it away to the poor. This part of Versailles' virtual landscape, then, was particularly notable for how it was engineered (military models of land control), what it naturalized (the political hierarchy), and what it obscured (commercial sources of French power).

With this historical case in mind, let us return to the present and ask about computer-based virtual realities: how are they engineered, what do they naturalize, and what do they obscure? We can begin with the labyrinth form. How it is used in electronic games? These games necessarily depend on complexly-designed virtual landscapes. But what moral messages or political lessons to they embody? Suggestively, they test a player's capacity to think through the logic of engineering for strategic advantage. Many of the games are organized around gaining tactical advantage by dominating places with weapons of war, but they are only trivially about training members of a future army to be aggressive. They certainly do encourage a willingness to die, while encouraging players to find ways to evade death as long as possible. In this, they are clearly military forms. But those playing these computer games act much like the nobles at Versailles did, when they walked on miniature ramparts or reviewed the trees and vegetables in the kitchen garden. Players practice political authority, and work on significant cognitive skills for seeing and controlling landscapes. "Marathon," for example (a labyrinth game, for those of you who don't know it) teaches players to build mental maps of where they have been and where they might be able to go. The athletic hero that the player "becomes" in this game jogs or races through long corridors of stone -- a space filled with the unexpected just like any maze. "He" must negotiate a maze in order to reach the next level, where another maze filled with even more and more threatening dangers await. Even the peaceable and beautiful "Myst," which presents idyllic landscapes instead of dungeon-like corridors, takes the player through a maze. Without the horrors or pleasures of war, there is still a terrain to master. Players learn where they are going, and how to find the resources to advance. In both games, those entering the fray ascend a hierarchy of spaces, skills, and tasks in order to improve their scores, and ascend a social hierarchy of players. In "Marathon" they advance through these linked hierarchies, by developing skills in seeing enemies and destroying them, but they achieve their objectives (like players in Myst do) by developing and using cartographic thinking.

Huizinga writing his theory of games, argued that what people learn through play are the rules of the game -- usually social rules that they practice in the safety of a play environment. The game is pleasurable because it exercises for people sets of skills that they find important; they want to improve themselves in these ways. Often the activities modeled in games have counterparts in normal life that seem or are potentially dangerous to players. That is part of the reason why war games are fascinating. If you don't do well in war in real life, the result is death. But war is also a model of competition with deadly consequences, something that many Americans worry about in relation to work. Anxiety about making money and getting ahead explain why Americans play games like "Monopoly" and "Life" so frequently. Working through the maze of capitalist existence is to many Americans a frightening fact of everyday life. The transfer of real-world anxieties to the game environment is an important part of the pleasure (and obsession) of play.

This brings us back to the rules of computer games, and the cultural importance of their virtual landscapes and maze structures. They show that control of place is treated as significant in the very electronic representations that are meant to be displacing it. If geographical space is becoming politically obsolete (as many argue about the nation-state), and land-control is no longer a matter of anxiety and control, you certainly couldn't tell it by studying the play content of computer games. Electronic landscapes are not erasing the placeness of politics, including military action, but teaching it through game play. Those who today aim virtual weapons at virtual places will be better able tomorrow to aim real weapons at targets in a very physical political geography. Importantly, however, political interest in controlling physical spaces is masked in today's virtual landscapes just as the role of capitalism in French politics was masked during the reign of the "Sun King". I would argue that strategic control of the landscape must be insistently significant to American world power or it would not be so actively taught AND vociferously denied.

French courtiers practiced estimation mathematics -- a useful skill for both setting out cannons by the military and using estate lands for commercial benefit in their period -- as they walked through the park at Versailles, following the king's itineraries written for promenades. It was a kind of cartographic thinking designed for surveillance and management of the landscape. Contemporary computer game players learn another kind of cartographic thinking -- techniques of surveillance -- but they think less about land management than strategic movement through space. They practice how to connect movements on the ground to a bird's eye view of spaces. While the land-management mentality of the 17th century was organized around concepts of good husbandry, or designing a good environment for human habitation, that sense of responsibility seems attenuated in the persent. In some games, such as "Sim City" and "Civilization," players are evaluated in part on their ability to create habitable spaces, but these concerns are minor compared to controlling the landscape through strategic intervention. Games like "Myth" are simply more overt in teaching players to connect their acquired topographical knowledge to strategic thinking about power. Success in this game depends mostly on knowing how to position warriors (with different arrays of weapons and capacities to use them) for the greatest momentary military benefit.

To connnect computer games to the arts of war is important but a bit obvious. It is common knowledge that computer engineering was first stimulated in America for military use, and that the traditional connection to the military is reflected in software as well as hardware; contemporary computer games continue to foreground strategic skills in using weapons to control places. The important thing is that the power of place is being denied in the rhetoric about virtual landscapes while skills for controlling landscape are being taught by computer games.

The military engineering heritage of computers is erased in contemporary parlance as soon as it is acknowledged. Scholars and computer afficianados alike claim that computers were once the domain of the military, but now are part of American business. We can breathe a sigh of relief. The Cold War is over. Children will learn to make money through computer games, not learn to kill and be killed. The DoD may have funded crucial developmental research, we are told, but Bill Gates now dominates American computer use because Microsoft dominates the industry. Any "problem" with computers now lies with a commercially-run system, not a military- oriented one. What is naturalized in this account is the link (whether celebrated or bemoaned) between computers and business.

Even debates around the meaning of war-centered computer games have taken a commercial turn. Now the games are criticized for pandering to the base interests of users in order to maximize profit. Critics tend to focus on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of violence in computer games (particularly for children), and the masculine bias in this kind of design of software. We are making a generation of ruthless businessmen -- a good thing to some, and a horror to others. Less discussed are the land-control issues in the logic of play that requires computer players to see the countryside as something to survey, remember, rework, traverse, and leave behind. We hear that computer afficiados live in virtual landscapes where land does not really count. But if it doesn't matter, why are players encouraged to keep running through landscape mazes? And if the countryside is now of no cultural and political interest, why do children keep going across the "Oregon Trail," murdering buffalo? What kind of educational conjunction is there in this version of history? And why is it good for kids to keep building new spaces in "Sim City" if in the future we are all going to dematerialize?

It is not immediately clear how the current regime of power could be benefitting from a population that sees itself as dematerialized -- if this cultural logic indeed has political dynamics. But certainly reducing the salience of place and advocating self-fashioning though encounters with technology would together help naturalize an Americanization of technology and engineering culture. It is very American to believe that you can make yourself, and define place through your own actions -- without real material constraints. The notion that people are not determined by their origins is certainly (and more generally) modern and Western. But it is particularly American to believe in an open-ended self-fashioning based on the assumption that social place is not apriori determined and that physical places can be infinitely reworked to serve the self.

The individualism of American culture might account for some of the self-fashioning in these virtual worlds, but why the insistence in American electronic culture that the land in landscape no longer matters? Is it just an attempt by Americans to obscure their own territorial ambitions? And why would Americans subscribe to such a belief when the land has been so central to American identity? One clue is that the loss of attention to land is associated rhetorically with the diminishing power of states. On the net, we learn, states no longer matter -- in part because the territorial constraints on legal authority fall apart.

But I would argue just the opposite. What is becoming dim in this vision of landscape is the on-going importance of the state -- particularly the importance of America in shaping the future through computer technology. Players in a vast array of computer games practice the arts of war, but not just any set of fighting skillls -- those connected to empire, not state-formation. The point is to be able to move at will through vast tracts of land, not keep them all under cultivation and make human communities on them. This is the model of military control under the Roman Empire, in which roads connected centers of power in a vast landscape, which was not so directly managed by Rome. In empires, the vast majority of the landscape "disappears"from direct supervision, and instead communication systems (like Roman roads) link vast spaces. The point of power is still to control land, but the techniques of power foreground the ability to forge links between power centers through communication because the spaces involved are too large to allow the kind of detailed , territorial management typical of the nation-state. Engineering culture in America has traditionally served both industry and the military to create an environment favorable to American politicoeconomic power. Sometimes this has meant creating strategic advantage in weaponry. Sometimes it has meant gaining advantage in the balance of trade. But in either case, an engineered landscape has been used to further American power, and this is what electronic virtual landscapes teach our children to understand (Oregon Trail, Sim City) and master (Marathon, Civilization).

Interestingly, the existence of toxins in virtual landscapes does not seem to bother software designers. They more often celebrate than bemoan problems with the environment; radioactive sludge and rivers of fire are standard landscape elements in computer games. "Marathon" has its players swim through polluted rivers as well as canalized lava flows. Such hazards are just another test of manliness. The willingness to face death in these games is not simply a readiness to die for military causes, but an eagerness to run manfully through the ruins of Western civilization. Human efforts to control the landscape are depicted as dangerous, but the engineered future comes in any case. The pathos of our engineering culture and its relationship to landscape is put into play.

The self-made man in early 19th-century America was often (and significantly) the engineer who "built a better mousetrap" and made a fortune as a result. Even though questions have been raised in the 20th century about the American culture of engineering, there remains an important faith in technical innovation as a road to betterment in the US that pervades discussions of computers. Virtual landscapes are importantly engineered worlds, better mousetraps in themselves, which have been the bases for new fortunes and new ways of life. Like French gardens, they visibly make manifest what is powerful (American engineering) by making it seem"natural"(not a matter of empire). Electronic landscapes remain (like gardens) means of naturalizing social orders through engineering of an American-defined technological future.

Games based in these landscapes, which take players through mazes that teach territorial mastery, address a cultural problem in American society now. How can we once again place engineering at the center of culture, reaffirming the kind of boot-strapping innovation so dear to the tradition of American economic growth and political power, and yet not have to think through the negative consequences of doing so? How can we favor our poltiical economy through empire without anyone noticing? Answer: Make everything virtual, or at least say that everything is virtual. Say that we leave our bodies and our places behind so we can remake ourselves and our world. Make a culture of play in which all innovations are conceivable, and none have "real" consequences. If we say it is natural to play with machines, then there is nothing to worry about. We will pretend that the skills of our warriors are unmarked, and that the lands we traverse can be rebooted back to an earlier form. We can suspend disbelief about our ability to solve problems that result from giving engineering cultural agency. We can be sanguine about the environment if we think what we are doing is natural. Surely, then nature should be pleased with the result. And everything seems so comfortingly orderly and rule-governmed on the computer! We can relax in the glow that comes from being at the center of empire. We can disappear into the landscape because we are one with it -- our people define it. No reason for us even to look up from the screen.

SLIDE 1- NOTRE DAME SLIDE 2- NOTRE DAME INTERIOR SLIDE 3- ROSE WINDOW SLIDE 4- CLOISTER GARDEN SLIDE 5- COLLISEUM SLIDE 6- ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN SLIDE 7- MAP OF FRANCE SLIDE 8- VERSAILLES GARDEN VIEW SLIDE 9- GARDEN PLAN SLIDE 10- TOPOGRAPHY-TERRACING SLIDE 11- TREES -- FOREST ROOMS SLIDE 12- FOUNTAINS SLIDE 13- STATUARY SLIDE 14- PARTERRE W FLOWERS SLIDE 15- APOLLO SLIDE 16- FETE SLIDE 17- FORTRESS FOOTPRINT SLIDE 18- SALLE DES FESTINS SLIDE 19- LABYRINTHE SLIDE 20- GILDED STATUE SLIDE 21- GUARD DES SUISSES SLIDE 22- ORANGERIE WALL SLIDE 23- WATER SOURCE OUTSIDE WALL SLIDE 24- WATER TANK WALLS SLIDE 25- POTAGER WALLS SLIDE 26- POTAGER RAMPARTS WITH TREES BELOW SLIDE 27- LABYRINTHE DESIGN FOR GARDEN

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