Recently, it seems that many conversations regarding space have shifted into conversations regarding place. As the long term preservation of Land Art becomes more questionable,[1] institutions and academics have sought multiple solutions or new approaches to working directly with landscape as a location for cultural production. Within Contemporary Art, the notion of site specificity has become an ever-increasing concern within installation, sculpture, and the creation of public works.[2] A simplification of the argument between these two locations is that space is more generic than place. Space provides a sense of openness, and place narrows that expanse into a more singular boundary, identity, and/or history. One could argue that space has more to do with imagination and place has more to do with factual reality. In another way, a argument could be made that within a location based work space is content – the visible material available to an artist/audience – and place is context – the “background” information of a work that aids critique, analysis, and commentary. A question then becomes, how can artists turn their attention toward overlapping space and place in attempts to dissolve these geographical, political, and cultural separations? Furthermore, ho woes the digital play with these two locations as a way of unhinging site-specific practices from outdated models maintained by traditional media?

Digital simulation of landscape and space radically unglues material and context from their traditional locations. When digital simulation is at the center of depicting the landscape and location, the screen takes on the properties of previous tools of representation. That substitution, however, does more than merely replace the former tools, it fundamentally changes our social and cultural relationship to location based artworks. Most concerns regarding space and place have to do with physical materiality as felt through (or expressed by) the presentness of the viewer. When presentness is mitigated through  computational simulation and screen technology, some of the original affect  of location works is inherently lost. That being said, there is also a new vein of presentness that is gained, as well as a new understanding of what location means for viewers and makers in establishing place. This complication provides potential for artists to more readily overlap space and place since this initial division is traditionally based on the presentness of participants/viewers.  
What follows is an inquiry into the status of place within digital contexts, and what landscape representation and ruin – a site of romantic fragmentation that continues to resonate in digital simulation – can provide for a contemporary dialog.

A fitting anecdote that might help situate this difficulty of placeness within digital environments is an experience that I had during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City almost exactly one year ago. I remember witnessing several accounts on social media warning of the immanent eviction of Zuccotti Park leading up to November 15th 2011. That night, I joined thousand of others in simultaneously watching the eviction taking place through a blurry and constantly buffering web-stream from the confines of my bedroom. My physical presentness was reduced to almost nothing through the browser window, but my digital presentness allowed me to talk for an hour to protesters community organizers, and international sympathizers in a flurry of quick comments of solidarity. At the time, it felt electrifying. I felt “there” in Zucotti Park, not as a space, but as a place. I felt in the company of political activists galvanized together not in one material environment, but in an immaterial specific location of camaraderie and support.

Later in December, while on a trip to the East Coast, I visited the OWS camp and didn’t feel that same presentness. In fact I felt quite the opposite; alienated, worrisome, paranoid, and generally skeptical of American political protest. Although many reasons contributed to this feeling, of disappointment, I couldn’t help but reflect on how powerfully my social, political and cultural obligation to participate in these protests had been altered by my physical presentness at the OWS protest. In essence, my online participation was all but lost once I had entered the space of the OWS camp.

The paradox of physicality being removed from the space while digitally feeling close to the place exemplifies the growing problematic that network technologies pose to situating location based artworks and the presentness that these works often require. The closeness that digital technology presents users creates scenarios of actively bridging space-time gaps that had previously been maintained in simulation technology like painting and photography. The real-time nature of digital networks creates a new presentness that was usually only afforded to local geographic proximity. Now that geographic has notably been expanded, allowing those interested in cultural production more avenues of intersection and engagement. That process of engagement is the key to establishing presentness within place-based art-work and cultural production. Without engagement – whether physical or digital  –  works addressing place are only half-completed, since their expression of specificity requires audience/viewer reciprocation.

A problem then arises in gauging how effective and meaningful that engagement is within digital frameworks. Some might argue that passive participation (and/or awareness) is enough; a type of engagement often defined as slacktivism. By merely”liking” a status update or “attending” an event on Facebook one feels a send of fulfilling and obligation to participate in a cultural activity should not equate presentness. Unfortunately this substitution has become a convincing status quo for measuring the success of location-specific works.

Attention to creating place within contemporary digital practices have become more pronounced with site specific works. However, these attempts have been tinged with a laziness that borders on historical recklessness. When digital works made under the auspices of website-specificity – a kind of location-specific practice dedicated to having a work hosted on only one webpage – the the potential for creating place wrested from space in undermined.
As a result, works that can question the division of space and place become increasingly improbable, and fall victim to further entrenching digital production into recapitulating traditional art practices. It might be argued that digital art is not beholden to offer challenges against tradition, but an opportunity for this medium to create new definitions and considerations for evaluating location-based works would be sorely squandered.

Artist experimenting with place in digital technologies must then negotiate between the presentness these technologies facilitate and the sites that they are wishing to engage. Addressing the loss of traditional presentness that occurs in site-specific works is activated in a process, since they already contain elements of an ongoing negotiation of presentness. Ruins become essential locations of study for digital practitioner due to the ways in which these fragmented locations offer immediate conduits for considering presentness in space.

Ruins provide architectural evidence of the passage of time, as well as shape specific qualities of a space that cultural practitioners can employ to turn that site into an investigation of place. It’s important to note that ruins are not solely characterized as sites of broken arches, caved-in cathedrals, or other architectural locations that permeate Romantic landscapes. Instead, a ruin should be viewed holistically as being one aspect of a cultural landscape; although it might manifest architecturally, it can also exist as a cultural and political phenomenon. The site that ruins occupy then, should not be based on a space, but instead should exist within a place – again, a location requiring presentness that exemplifies specific cultural, political, or aesthetic qualities.
Ruins can thus be considered to exist in decentralized sites of cultural investigation an exploration, instead of a specific temporal or geographic locations.

This decentralization provides a fitting context for digital artists to feel affinity for ruins, since the technologies that these artists employ are modular, nodal, and atemporal to a certain extent.[3] As the paradigm of presentness grows to adapt to decentralized and atemporal relationships between the body and space, digital technology becomes the most apropos medium for contemporary artists to address how ruins create and exist in places. The corporeal body that presentness requires is no longer identified by traditional Humanism. Instead this body is fragmented and fractured as a result of the growing (now almost dominant) tendency of digital representations to act as the stand-in for physical objects and spaces. From a certain perspective, these digital technologies and representations facilitate an entire framework for the creation and distribution of contemporary ruins.[4]
As Brian Dillion notes, “the ruin is a site not a melancholy or mourning but of radical potential – its fragmentary, unfinished nature is an invitation to fulfill the as yet unexplored temporality that it contains.”[5] In this way, the shared radical potential of ruins and digital technology should be paired together to address the growing need for new forms of place and presentness within contemporary art. The invitation posed to digital artists should be met not only with an enthusiasm, but also with a willingness to break from the standards of addressing place as established (and seemingly enforced) by the stagnation of traditional media.