Media Matters

Editors Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys will join in a conversation with authors Jeffrey Moro and Brian Harris to discuss the relationships among various tools, methods, and images that shape our conceptions of landscapes and environments. The conversation will be moderated by Jessica Varner, assistant professor of landscape architecture.

Media Matters in Landscape Architecture goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provides the context for many of the chapters in that the media and methods employed are designed to capture phenomena that are not directly visible to human perception, and where there is a high degree of uncertainty or changeability due to dynamic material conditions. Authors from a wide range of disciplines—landscape architecture, media studies, science and technology studies, history of science, engineering, ecology, and architecture—examine how the creation and use of data, images, and models act as the mediums through which a particular understanding of “environment” or “landscape” arises. This framing of environmental media emphasizes the relationships among various design media and the specific material and social environments within which they operate.

Jeffrey Moro is Assistant Clinical Professor of Digital Humanities and Digital Studies with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also affiliated with African American Digital and Experimental Humanities (AADHum) and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). He is currently at work on a book titled Cloud Studies: A Media Archaeology of the Atmosphere, which explores the mediation of the atmosphere as data from Earth’s surface to outer space. Past work has appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Environmental Media, and Amodern, among other venues. He holds a PhD in English with a certificate in digital studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Brian Harris is a researcher with the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Coastal and Hydraulics Lab in the Coastal Engineering Branch. Dr. Harris received a doctorate in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a concentration in Geotechnical Engineering from Louisiana State University, where his dissertation focused on natural coastal infrastructure. Harris’s research interests include the geotechnical design, construction, performance, and monitoring techniques of Natural and Nature Based Features (wetlands, headlands, mangroves, islands) and the beneficial use of dredged material. 

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