Mapping for machines, by machines is big business. Yet mapping’s artificial intelligences also have the potential to transform myriad design and research areas, to influence policy-making and governance, to support environmental preservation and public health – and, in the process, to pose critical questions about how our cartographic technologies conceptualize and operationalize space.
Computation Lectures
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Fall 2017
Computing Landscapes: Imaginative Mapping and Environmental RepresentationOrganized by Moa Carlsson, PhD Candidate with Professor Terry Knight
Art and instrumentality have long been part of the study and design of landscapes. Construed as a dynamic nexus with social, perceptual, and physical dimensions, landscapes are interrogated through instruments that take many forms: maps, drawings, paintings, computer programs, rulesets, texts, and most importantly, the imagination. Modelling dynamic scenarios requires technical precision and compelling representational skills, but may also involve pretense and visual trickery. The Computing Landscapes series explores the act of seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically, and attempts to study dynamic scenarios through (digital or non-digital) simulation models. Collectively, invited speakers will address questions such as: How can computational processes be designed to allow for unfolding discoveries? What roles can human agency play in technologically-mediated simulation? How can artistic and visual inquiry inform data driven processes, or vice versa?
Oct 27, 2017 - 5:00pm
Room 7-429/Long Lounge
We live in a world where much of what we know about things is affected by the manner in which those things are represented in digital form. In fact, our interaction with that world itself in increasingly influenced by the manner in which it is seen through through the eyes of geospatial technology.
Nov 17, 2017 - 5:00pm
Room 7-429/Long Lounge
In discourses about design, computation often operates ambivalently both as a reference to concrete technologies, and as an epistemic template for generative, descriptive, or analytical aspirations. Tracing early disclosures of this productive ambivalence, this talk will reflect on two artifacts from the history of Computer-Aided Design. The first is the “Plex,” a theoretical construct developed by mathematician Douglas Ross in the mid 1950s, which helped steer early CAD research and foreshadowed object orientation.