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From here to infinity: Make-Believe and Virtuality On the Japanese Driving Range

“At one blow, they become the hollow mold from which the image of modernity was cast.”1 Driving ranges mark the crossing point along the figure-eight shaped path whose two curved ends correspond to the earliest appearance of the golf course in Japan and the emerging contemporary phenomenon of virtual golf. The Japanese driving range represents both the intersection of post-enlightenment Western ideas about nature, expressed in picturesque landscape paintings and played out on the golf course, and the Zen garden’s abstract explorations of the pure space of the image. Their conflation produces a displaced and displayed landscape that is for the eye and the ball only, a new yet vaguely familiar synthetic hybrid that is already both too flat and too three-dimensional. As an instrument for processing space into image, the driving range is both a model and a privileged vantage point for examining the transformative possibilities of architecture. The driving range, as strategic set-up that negotiates between architecture and the representational elements of the landscapes of golf, also suggests alternative models to the purely representational, or totally virtual leisure-fueled environments of the 21st century, embodied by virtual golf.