Course abstract

Visual communications for landscape architects, as it's taught and practiced, is often appropriated and derivative from technologies and pedagogies of architecture and planning. However, landscape confronts forms, material conditions, and ecological processes more complex than the other design disciplines. Landscape Media is a shift in approach to medium and digital environments. Quickly moving beyond the acquisition of data and the digital automation of repetitive tasks, this course offers a landscape-centric approach to digital media that focuses on the manipulation and creation of data, i.e., the "fabrication" of missing information and spatial description across many scales. This requires critical and ethical reflection on data organization, spatially explicit methodologies, and the exhibition or reproduction of information in derivative forms. Lectures address the evolution of terrain- and surface-based representation and technologies from the origins of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the 1960s, 1990s digital revolution in architecture, datascapes, and advancements in point-cloud data in the 2000s.

For their term projects, students have explored conflicts between development, environmental degradation, and engineered-environmental systems at sites across South and Southeast Asia. Most recently, students applied GIS-based and parametric techniques to construct diagrams and 3D-printed surface models of extractive systems and their landscape impacts in northern Myanmar's Chindwin River basin. Transnational alongside informal- and insurgent-controlled mining of gold, copper, and jade and large-scale logging occur in remote forests of high conservation value. Recent plans for development corridors connecting India, China and Thailand through northern Myanmar will pass through and open up these frontiers to economic development.