Pietrusko Brings His Immersive, Intermedia Experiments to Venice
Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith with Bernd Lintermann, "trans_actions," 2011 (Photo: ZKM Center for Art and Media)
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One in a series of reports on faculty and students invited to exhibit at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and the European Cultural Centre's Time Space Existence.
The year was 2000, and the designer, architect, and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko fell for a pavilion. He was in Paris, doing a fellowship in the lab of avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis—who, while working as part of Le Corbusier’s atelier, had designed the multimedia Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Pietrusko was struck by how the building incorporated film projections and hundreds of audio speakers into its hyperbolic paraboloid interior, collapsing form and function, sight and sound. “I imagined the type of practice that I would do,” he says, “these immersive, intermedia experiments.”
And that’s the practice he went on to build. Before joining the faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Weitzman as an associate professor in 2022, he earned a Bachelor of Music in Music Synthesis from the Berklee College of Music, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University, and a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he also taught for a decade. He released albums, including 2019’s Six Microphones (LINE), recorded live in 2013 at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, in which half a dozen microphones and speakers performed duets with each other. He also formed a design agency, Warning Office, which has conceived publications of speculative cartography and investigations of conspiracy theories like Flat Earthism.
Those practices of sound and sight are, for him, linked like the Philips Pavilion. “There are analogies in music composition that are useful for the delivery of information: a theme, extrapolation, recapitulation, putting it into conversation with other ideas later,” he says. “A lot of the topics I deal with are cyclical, and deal with difference and repetition. In economics, in ecology, there are cycles; in satellites, there are orbits. Everything is an oscillation, a repetition, a cycle.”
Robert Gerard Pietrusko, "Six Microphones," 2015 version. Shown as part of an exhibit at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Le Corbusier's only built work in North America. (Jeff P. Elstone)
It’s fitting, then, that some 25 years after his Paris epiphany, he’ll participate in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti. Twice, in fact.
For MIT Press’s Antikythera technology think tank, he’s working on a piece about the Event Horizon Telescope, which helped produce the first images of a black hole. “I’m creating a seven-minute movie with the historian and physicist Peter Galison, who’s the head of the Black Hole Institute at Harvard,” he says, “and another long-time collaborator, Stewart Smith, that combines data vizualizations and soundscapes with Peter’s filmmaking, creating a narrative arc of how these images came to be.” This work orbits around Pietrusko’s long-standing interested in environmental test sites, which prompted his recent symposium Proxy Landscapes at Weitzman, presented by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. “Landscapes historically have been objects that we use to know other things,” he says. Black holes, then, might be seen as screens upon which we project ideas about territory, science, even the meaning of existence itself.
In Venice’s Arsenale, Pietrusko will debut an even more ambitious synthesis called A Satellite Symphony. Made with design firm Space Caviar and astrophysicist Ersilia Vaudo of the European Space Agency, the installation explores how satellites frame how we understand the earth itself. This understanding includes basic conceptions of our planet. “We can use a complex constellation of satellites to measure the center of the Earth at a resolution of just millimeters,” he says. But it extends into the built environment, and beyond. “At a radically different scale, we can look at how environmental remote sensors track aquatic and landscape features in Venice and Veneto.” This data can show what was lost, for example, during sudden catastrophes like the floods and landslides which battered the region in 2018. It can also anticipate what’s to be lost as Venice’s famed canals rise due to climate change. A Satellite Symphony uses data—originally from satellite imagery harvested to assess damage—as material for a large-scale composition which will be seen and heard in a viewing structure constructed from trees from the Veneto region lost in those storms, remixing Xenakis’s mid-century optimism for our more pessimistic era.
Pietrusko on Penn's campus in March of 2025 (Photo Eric Sucar)
Perhaps, though, that pessimism is itself a cycle to work through.
At Weitzman, Pietrusko teaches a studio called Conspiracy as Method. First, students identify the narrative of a recent natural disaster through the data it generates, and make a film to tell its story. Then, they retell the story, assigning its origin to a conspiracy and analyzing how it would have worked. “I want to liberate their imagination,” he says. “This third kind of speculative design future starts from a conspiracy theory, but it turns it on its head and into a way to imagine a future where we have collaborations. Conspiracy theorists, ironically, are some of the most optimistic folks in the world, because they actually believe society can collectively create reality.”
