Work in Progress…
The aim of this project was to utilize agent-based modeling, and dynamic simulations to represent movement as part of an indeterminate system in order to critique and manipulate static and bordered cartography. The research phase of the project looked closely at the history of migrations, cartography, and bordered landscapes, and then used computation to find new ways of interpreting the spatio-temporal configurations of movement. By replacing the legends of the map with agent behaviors and interactions as opposed to fixed entities, I intend to show the primacy of movement through experimental representations and new mappings…
what follows is a condensed version of my MLA thesis project:
Human beings play the central role in how earth systems function. Future ecologies, geo-politics, infrastructure, technology, extra-state spaces, climate catastrophe, walls, the visible and invisible enforcement of borders have intensely felt consequences for a living world that has always been migrating and moving.
Movement is a constant, borders and the enforcement of them are not. These contradictions set up a task of impossibility for designers who set out to represent the world through drawings.
Representation is the language of design, the medium of our communication, an endless pursuit.
But it is flawed.
This critique of representation stems from the ways in which our profession can often use its language to frame what are messy systems of movement and indeterminacy into static pictures.
One of the primary tools of landscape architecture is mapping.
The framing of mobility within static layers of a two-dimensional map is problematic and upholds the borders and boundaries that humans have created. In debates about and speculation of the future migration and mobility on this planet, maps help to reinforce that movement is not a solution, but instead the trouble…
The process of gathering geographic information, grabbing layers from GIS, or measuring fluxes by relying on data from optical satellites whose orbits miss moments in time, and even lack clarity on cloudy days…
…cannot capture the subtly and deep layers of a world on the move.
Our tools of gathering, observation, and representation are often not suited to the task appreciating movement.
This project was highly experimental… a frenzied three months of attempts at getting around the ways that two-dimensional drawings make things still. My process was as intentional as the results, a collection of rhetorical maps that show the world, not as it is, but in different time or space configurations, or in simplified resolution… but always with movement as motivation.
As the skeleton from which to build my experimentation I used Christopher Reznick’s Anthropocene Time Line, an interdisciplinary compilation that attempts to reckon with human influences over time by presenting arguments (in the form of scientific papers) for when the Anthropocene started.
I started with static representations to index and organize and then re-organize the elements of my project.
I created an index of working definitions and connections. The elemental objects gave new meaning to my research allowing me to place importance on words and concepts, and then identify agents in the history of human interaction with the planet.
The rearrangement of these two-dimensional drawings revealed attractors and impediments, modifiers, and possible interactions…
Showing me with more clarity that history cannot be explained deterministically, and that the strength and variability of these interactions mean that no outcome was or is determined.
Agent based modeling, blender simulations/animations, and game engines expanded by representation methods allowing me to define the elements of my representations by the behaviors of its elements.
For Instance, at the scale of a seed… subject to the variability of climatic changes, held up in the obstacles of the environment it moves through, each seed enters into an indeterminate number of possible outcomes, unknown and chaotic. In this simulation I am experimenting with impediments and different rates of expiration.
Experimenting with computational modeling through the use of built-in physics systems and agent interactions, Blender did the work initiating collaboration with software that could make the mapping of agents more accurate. Supplementing my insufficient ability to articulate movement through drawing, the computer software simulates the physics of elements like wind, speed, and animal movement, establishing a new language for the fixed legends of cartography.
words in video taken from the Introduction of Thomas Nail’s book: Being and Motion
Oxford University Press, 2018
Building worlds that allowed me to move through time and space while animating some agents by manipulating their goals, impediments, and interactions.
I created rhetorical devices to show the ways that drawing freezes our understanding of time as well as species interactions.
Interactive art pieces and game logic provokes contact with the agents/attractors/stoppages within my scenes and reveals that interconnectedness to deep time is here now and still emerging.
The immensity of how to understand and live in, much less draw the heartache that comes with the human influence and entanglement with the planet started this project. This experimentation was propelled by my intention as a designer to earnestly participate in conversations of what our species will value in the future as we take into account a history of western colonization and the supervision of moving systems.
My internal struggle as a student of landscape architecture experiencing representation as inherently limited but also necessary brought this project to the place it is now.
I am in fact using drawings to critique drawings, but I believe that is because the right and known way to represent movement doesn’t exist. The best that our discipline can do is to critique and push the tools at our disposal.
This project aims to infect us with the idea that valuing mobility is the way to interface with our world. Creating new legends on different kinds of maps within our unstable and hopefully less supervised systems might create new scales and strands of citizenship, and the maps that we know can fade from the background