A decade of practice engaging the physical, cultural, and economic complexity of the Mississippi Delta and coastal Louisiana. Through modeling, simulation, and embedded computation, this work develops methodologies for understanding and designing with systems that exceed prediction "” where land is actively becoming sea, where cultural continuity and ecological change are inseparable, and where the politics of who measures what determines whose land gets protected.
The Army Corps of Engineers' 1:2000 scale physical model of the entire Mississippi River basin "” the largest physical model ever built. An analog computer, cautionary tale, and prototype for computational landscape thinking. Now abandoned, it embodies the limits of prediction at territorial scale.
A robotic system for co-creative vegetation management. Machines that work alongside plant growth cycles over years, introducing inputs and reading plant responses as data "” producing landscapes that neither the designer nor the machine could produce alone. A demonstration of multi-species co-authorship at landscape scale.
A sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay whose residents have inhabited and adapted to land loss for generations. A case study in the politics of sensing and measurement: who deploys the instruments, whose knowledge counts, and how the framing of a problem determines which solutions are imaginable.
Territories as cyborg assemblages: the coupling of biological processes with computational sensing and feedback to produce adaptive, self-modifying landscapes. Research into synthetic ground "” neither purely natural nor purely designed "” where biological autonomy and computational mediation are inseparable.
[Additional projects to be added]