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. This past year, students flexed their new digital design theory and skills in digital technology to reflect on a set of Hong Kong-sited landscape ecology literature. These included topics on: historical data integration for long-term modelling of forest succession; high-resolution modelling of urban habitat ecological connectivity; broad-species habitat modelling for tourism planning; cumulative environmental impact assessment; and geotechnical slope stability risk assessment.
