LAND_521 Landscape Architecture Seminar: ‘Visualizing Ecological Processes’

This course dove into three sections, each of which materialized as an exercise: 1) a personal WEBSITE, 2) a MOVIE TRAILER on climate change, and 3) a COMMERCIAL on climate change.

Ecology is traditionally understood as the flow of energy and the cycling of materials. We work with digital and analogue time-based models to represent ecology as a biology-based science entangled with social and cultural ecologies. Media waves are as real as water waves, and it is time landscape architects stop refusing to equate digital with immaterial ecologies. Visualizations do work.

All representations are political. From the 1920s agitpróp (agitation propaganda) to Arab Spring, Cambridge Analytica, and police body cameras, media has been explicitly politicized as a weapon. The “Scorched Earth” documentaries relay this history, as well as “The Century of the Self,” “HyperNormalisation,” the Bechdel Test, and Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze. Orientalisms are reified when populations and places are misrepresented or remain invisible.

In 1968 Los Angeles and again in 1977 Chicago, Ray and Charles Eames released the “Powers of 10.” Yet the two bright, young, white characters represent the leisure and privilege to nap and dream on a lakeside, while from ’68 until ’77 those same cities and universities burned. The representations we make for others render our own portraits in terms of what we value.

In this seminar, students focused on the how and why of time-based tools and technology by covering concepts like duration, narrative, story, character, subject, plot, and genera. Particular attention was also paid to how representations affect our perception of people and places. Dynamic material modeling processes, such as “wet computation” (Lars Spuybroek-like soap films) and sound (Foley effects, field recordings, narration) were used. The seminar also addressed the role of branding and the need for designers to take charge of framing their own public identity, skills, and experiences in a manner that far exceeds reliance on traditional design portfolios.