Faustian Encounters

What are the landscape aesthetics appropriate for a post-picturesque world? What are the aesthetic consequences of authentically alien technologies? And how do relational aesthetics challenge the ecological, political, aesthetic, and representational assumptions underlying landscape architecture as it is practiced today?

This studio takes two positions: that design aesthetics emerge from the interplay of technology, culture, and societal challenges; and that the fundamental challenge of design in the Anthropocene is how to engage with both humans and non-humans non-hierarchically, with neither humans atop the ontological pyramid, nor certain groups of humans atop the pyramids of power. And so in order to engage non-human intelligent systems as design partners, and to bring novel technologies into the landscape architectural discourse, we will make a sort of Faustian bargain—a deal with the Devil—and learn to work with machine learning (ML) systems, a category of artificial intelligence technologies which many smart people fear, and yet which hold enormous potential for transformation—for revolutionary aesthetic practice. Crucially, we will contextualize these technologies within critical frameworks that resist the hegemonic structures driving landscape architecture today but which remain untranslated into physical form.