Studio V

Students in Associate Professor, Christopher Marcinkoski's studio are tasked—over the course of the semester—to remain preoccupied with disciplinary concerns related to form, space, material, and human sensorial experience. At the same time, students are simultaneously imagining, actively designing, a physical landscape who’s intentionally created composition reflects upon the ecological crisis we are living through and the near certain end of humanity as we know it. A physical landscape deliberately shaped by the curation of human experiences that do not actually center the human in their conception and making.

This semester-long endeavor is an optimistic one; not a bummer! An opportunity to become preoccupied with the shaping of aesthetic experiences through the crafting of physical space as a means of engaging with the climate crisis in which we are living. This approach is intended to offer an alternative to remaining burdened by the relentless pursuit of enhanced ecological performance in the hope of solving or stopping a now inevitable restructuring of the planet. Some might characterize such an exercise as a monument to futility. Or to the Sixth Mass Extinction. Students can use this studio as an opportunity to reframe their own individual relationship to and understanding of the present moment. An invitation to imagine freely, yet rigorously, about the nature of human aesthetic experience, and how those experiences shape one’s own individual understanding of the climate crisis. Bound up in this paradox are inevitable questions of representation—words, images, ideas—and questions of environment—naturally occurring, human impacted, and intentionally human constructed. 

The Aesthetic Experience of Ecology, will travel to Tokyo and Kyoto for a week as the studio explores the focal site of Tokyo Bay. The bay's waterfront reclamation practices of constructing artificial islands using incinerated waste, provide the studio’s physical context for understanding an ecological experience and emotional relationship with the climate crisis.