景观测知—新自然的诞生 | Sensing Landscapes — a neo-Natural Incarnate (Landscape architecture frontiers)
Leif Estrada, 2017, asymptote diagram, Responsive Environments and Artifacts Laboratory, Cambridge.
abstract
As landscape designers, we face complexities and indeterminacies when dealing with morphological phenomena. The advent of the Anthropocene only but increased such landscape transformations, most especially those that are directly affectedby hydrological morphologies. Though engineering technologies alleviate such problématique, this paper seeks to present an alternative methodology in the use of responsive technologies, enabling real-time adaptive management, which favors ecological processes over static constructions as a design methodology. Experimentations were conducted to ground such theoretical assertions, while addressing the inconsistencies and spontaneity produced by responsive systems and accepting their integration into the landscape as part of its new Nature.
keywords
sentient landscapes, sensing, autonomy, robotics, nature
- Landscape Architecture Frontiers:
1. Introduction - Addressing Complexities
Complexities and indeterminacies are some of the issues one must confront when dealing with landscape phenomena—and the foremost concerns when engaging with fluid dynamics that affect the landscape’s geomorphology. While it is possible to design infrastructures and interventions that alter such landscapes, responsive technologies provide a method of real-time adaptive management, creating methods that tend to curate and choreograph evolving ecological systems. The result is a design methodology that favors inconsistency and spontaneity between ecology and anthropogenic infrastructure that does not require an unending quest for precision in predictability, or even more data.
Historically, when the son of the father of relativity, Hans Einstein, approached his father about his keen interest in leaving structural engineering to study and research sediment transports, he was dissuaded, citing the very study as intractable and that he should do something less complex (Einstein, 1937-1972).
Towards Sentience, a graduate design thesis and other various research experiments, sponsored by the basement laboratory of the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL) at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design incorporates the design of responsive systems, augmenting a geomorphology table, which stands as a site of intervention (Fig.1). These experimental tests aim to simulate the potentiality of responsive infrastructures to modify the behaviors of riverine landscapes and their fluvial morphologies—including land accretion, vegetal proliferation, and species colonization.
Fig. 1 Image of the geomorphology table—utilized as the site of intervention for multiple experiments. Photograph by Bradley Cantrell.
The precision of phenomenal predictability of fluid dynamics may, at the moment, be outside the full grasp of scientific knowledge; however the utilization of a hydrology model captures the behavioral essence of a river’s alluvial processes. These exclude the belaboring mathematical algorithm derived from numerical modeling, which are imprecise, as it does not take into account such indeterminacies, caused by the changing environment’s variance. Using the immediate knowledge acquired through real-time sensing, the indeterminate inconsistencies become latent (Fig. 2) and are taken advantage of as it becomes enmeshed through the introduction of technology as a new form of ecology, and eventually Nature, itself.
Fig. 2 Temporal 3D-printed soil samplings scanned from the geomorphology table, which were produced at an instant creating a neo-Nature. Models by Leif Estrada, photograph by Robert Tangstrom.
The addition of real-time sensing and response creates new layers of knowledge that is immediately acquired and understood in relation to a specific moment of shift or occurrence of change. However, despite the level of understanding, such sensory is limited to fully predict the projective morphology of riverine landscapes, as every moment is infinitely iterative, as it is asymptotic (Fig. 3). Despite of this, however, the complexities of a hyper-real feedback loop (Fig. 4) produce new understandings of its immediate context, such as new directions of water flow as observed in an early study model, the Depositor (Fig. 5) or the emergence of temporal landforms that is in constant flux with the Attuner (responsive model of Towards Sentience) (Fig. 6). These manifested forms are usually not latent to human understanding or even through the nature of delayed analyses brought upon by post-processing. In turn, delayed understanding becomes a hindrance to the potential manifestation of unseen landforms and land types.
Though lacking the precision of data, real-time sensing and monitoring enables the facilitation of the emergence of new morphological forms across the constantly shifting landscapes, specifically those of riverine systems, which at the same time is brought upon by the epoch of anthropogenic processes and the already-seemingly technology-augmented hyper-reality we are in.
Fig. 3 A conceptual diagram, based upon the idea of an asymptote; showing the resolution of phenomenal predictability in relation to time (the development of technological precision and a responsive infrastructure’s understanding of its context.) Diagram by Leif Estrada.
Fig. 4 Feedback loop diagram showing the machine’s learning; narrowing the gap between intentionality and indeterminacy. Diagram by Leif Estrada.
Fig. 5 Depositor, an experimental real-time and responsive model programmed to interrupt the flow of water. It instantaneously re-directs it to percolate down a new fluvial direction, affecting its geomorphology. https://vimeo.com/152837202 Model and temporal images by Leif Estrada.
Fig. 6 Attuner, a real-time responsive model that monitors and modifies the alluvial morphology of sedimentation based on the fluvial flux of water, resulting in land accretion. It constantly learns from its environment and context through a feedback loop. https://vimeo.com/166623512 Model by Leif Estrada, photograph by Robert Tangstrom.
2. Theoretical - Mergence of Nature and Technology
As the machine’s senses are different in that of a human, its perception is modulated by the translation of such perceived phenomena happening in the Natural realm of reality into the realm of the virtual through sensing and actuated response (Fig. 7). The infinitely iterative process is eventually re-applied back into the initial state of Nature to create a neo-incarnate.
The compounding process is as follows:
Nature (Reality) -> Virtual -> Neo-Nature -> Virtual -> (Neo)Neo-Nature…
Fig. 7 Modulated perception by the translation of the Natural realm of reality into the realm of the virtual through sensing and actuated response. Drawing by Leif Estrada.
Though to conservatives, this transformative process creates an image of a degrading environment and produces the perceived notion that Nature is in danger due to technological augmentations. This problematizes and undermines the undiscovered value of such emerging neo-Natures, produced as a hybrid with technology. It further oversimplifies the complexities produced co-dependently by ecological processes and technology—where the proliferating ubiquity are immediately deemed bad, without consideration that its existence is an indication of a productive and sustaining system.
However, one can argue that technological advancements have always been in dialectic with Nature. Framing the processes of Nature through a Marxian perspective, it can be deduce that production is a continuing process, which alters the forms of Nature by humans along with technology’s aide. As such, “the producer ‘can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of the matter... he is constantly helped by natural forces... the producer changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him...” (Marx & Engels, 1845/1947). Humans have altered objects from Nature through labor to produce useful things in order to facilitate and fulfill our needs to thrive as species, whether or not we are conscious of the ecological impact we are causing and altering. The shift is inevitable, as we continue to create new technologies in order to mitigate landscape phenomena for our benefit.
Today, new technologies, specifically those that augment the environment with its mergence with the virtual realm has become an extension of our being. Digital connectivity is more and more becoming a part of our own neo-Nature. A disconnection from this phenomenological and responsive infrastructure brings upon a new sense of anxiety, which can be disabling (Pícon, 2000). Though created by man, it can be unsettling when these creations become uncontrolled, and informalities begin to occur. The idea of man’s inability to tame his own creation reverts our perception of these neo-Natures as “unnatural,” and exoticizes their existence as being the “other” (Latour, 2011).
3. Experimentation and Projection - Towards Neo-Nature
Towards Sentience incorporates the design of a responsive infrastructural model, which attunes the projective alluvium of the geomorphology table through a series of real-time sensing and responsive manipulations as a way to curate the successions of sediment accretion—constantly altering and modifying the riverine landscape, privileging the evolution of ecological processes over static constructions.
When deployed in the one-to-one landscape, the machine intends to learn from initial site conditions of typically degrading engineered channels (the LA River, as explored in the thesis), but also from the modifications it will produce independently with its sensories, and co-depently with what is being sensed. The responsive infrastructure aims to become sentient, through learning from its environments, iteratively honing on specific operational processes, as an opportunistic ecological agent, which strives to:
erode existing concrete lining, and understand the new material as part of the sedimentation process (Fig. 8 + 9);
attenuate flows of water and sediment in order to accrete new temporal landforms;
infiltrate the subterranean landscape to potentially recharge existing, and create new aquifers (Fig. 10 + 11);
and predict the potential successive planting that would endure the projective new Nature of such channels (Fig. 12).
Fig. 8 Soil Analyses presented as an attribute matrix, analyzing the varying soil compositions that would potentially accrete in the projective succession of the LA River as the concrete substrate is degraded. Drawing by Leif Estrada.
Fig. 9 Engineered Soil Samples: The following "sediments" were used in the live-modeling of the fluvial morphology of riverine systems, which are based upon the weights of the corresponding compositions of varying soils that were analyzed: gravel, sand, silt, clay, loam, sandy loam, silt loam, and clay loam. Soil mixtures by Leif Estrada, photograph by Robert Tangstrom.
Fig. 10 Attuner, imagined as real-time responsive injection piles charging existing and new aquifers seen from below the water table as a swaziometric perspective. Rendering by Leif Estrada.
Fig. 11 Attuner, injection piles detail shown in multiple conditions. Drawing by Leif Estrada.
Fig. 12 Species Analyses, showing each plant’s ideal attribute, which can be overlaid with the soils analyses. Drawings by Leif Estrada.
Sentient-ly, it will attune the fluvial landscape—to a level of degree that man is incapable of processing in order to respond and modify the landscape in real-time. Projective-ly, responsive infrastructures would be created by landscape architects and designers to aid themselves and address human incapability in negotiating complexities that occur in real-time, which necessitates immediate responses. These necessitated responses are usually slowed down or hindered by subjective policies that govern landscape processes. This new ability also enables our relationships with non-human agents throughout all terrestrial landscapes in the form of a “distant author” (Waldheim, 2006).
Through the introduction of new imagined sensories emergence of new forms within the landscapes are enabled, which has never been possible without the machine’s new dimensions of sentience. Such manifested forms created by the compounding process of the neo-Nature would further bring upon disorientation as to what was once Natural. These phenomena would cause for the rejection of the current dichotomy created by ‘man-made’ technologies and ‘idealized’ notions of untouched natural processes.
Our ability to conceptualize and create hybrids of biotic and abiotic systems facilitates the evolution of neo-Natures. Technological design is consistently introduced to “tame” biologic systems to human will. To legitimize these interventions, humans find and extract any economic and practical capacities. However, despite levels of human control, there is always a moment in which a system will reach its limitations. As such, these limitations will produce our new perceptions of Nature.
A shift concerning ecology and Nature in what has been the accepted norm is inevitably upon us.
Reference List
Bryant, L. (2013). Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cantrell, B. E. & Holzman, J. (2015). Responsive Landscapes: Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture. London: Routledge.
Einstein, H. A. (1937-1972). MS 80/8. Inventory of the Hans Albert Einstein Papers, 1937-1972. The Water Resources Collections and Archives, University of California - Riverside, Riverside, California.
Latour, B. (2011). Love your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies as we do Our Children. Breakthrough Journal, No. 2, Fall 2011. Oakland: Breakthrough Institute. 21-28.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845, 1947). Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materials and Idealist Outlook. The German Ideology, Parts I & III, . Vol. 6. Reprint, New York: International Publishers.
Pícon, A. (2000). Anxious Landscapes: From Ruin to Rust. Gray Room 01. Cambridge: MIT Press, 63-84.
Waldheim, C. (2006). Strategies of Indeterminacy in Recent Landscape Practice. Public 33: Errata. Toronto: Public, 80-86.
This essay was first published by Landscape Architecture Frontiers on 1 February 2017 in English and Chinese.
Acknowledgements
Bradley Cantrell, Associate Professor of Landscape Architectural Technology, Director of the Landscape Architecture Program, MDes-Technology Area Co-Coordinator, Harvard University-Graduate School of Design; for sponsoring my thesis as advisor and the continued support in exploring such ideas.
Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory, MDes-ULE Area Co-Coordinator, Harvard University-Graduate School of Design; for the rigorous theoretical discussion in defining “Nature.”
Robert Tangstrom; for the professional photographic documentation of the thesis.
Angus Zhang and Xiaoxuan Lu, Editors at Landscape Architecture Frontiers; for translating the English text to Chinese.