ABOUT THE COURSE

This course introduces critical theories and creative methods for visualizing interconnected transformations of urban, environmental, and planetary systems amidst the pressures of climate change, urbanization, and global economies of capitalism. 

At its core, the class revolves around a helical pair of questions: how does the way we theorize these transformations change the ways we envision their dynamics and effects? Conversely, how do the ways we visualize these transformations mediate how we theorize them?

We approach these questions through the prism of spatial media, “the mediums... that enable, extend or enhance our ability to interact with and create [networked] geographic information” (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013: 544). These include not only geospatial data and information, but hardware and software, technical workflows and aesthetic techniques, cartographic content and modes of representation. Spatial media organize our experience of space and place, and structure those narratives geographically. It is in this spirit that spatial media entail “maps” and “mapping” in the most expansive sense of the terms.

Pairing lecture/seminar-style sessions with more hands-on technical tutorials (“labs”) and mapping workshops (“studios”), this is a thinking and/with/through making course. Working with spatial media is process-based and iterative. We will move from critically analyzing prevalent theoretical frameworks, geospatial data, and associated visualization techniques to creatively visualizing critical alternatives. We’ll learn how to construct visual narratives through a variety of media, sites, scales, methods, tools, and concepts.

WINTER 2024 THEME: Mapping the 3/4 Coast

This winter we will explore the watery geographies of Chicago and the Great Lakes– the so-called “Third Coast” of the United States– and their conjuncture with the Mississippi River watershed– the “Fourth Coast.” Invoking its ambivalent, contingent, and always-incomplete figuration, we call this the 3/4 Coast. 

By critically analyzing and experimenting with visual representations of socio-ecological change from the 19th-century into the near future, we will develop a way of understanding how these changes operate unevenly across different spatial media-- data, bodies, places, landscapes, and geographies-- that connect the most local scales-- a microbe, a plant, a birdsong-- to planetary climatic systems and global geopolitics.

By focusing on this “invented territory,” we’ll also take up a perspective on broader theories of epochal global change-- e.g., the Anthropocene and its various critical alternatives-- situated in particular landscapes. In this sense, the 3/4 Coast becomes a multiscalar, multisited model for approaching expansive geographies of crisis and change through deeply rooted, localized histories and dynamics.  

Using a selected suite of technical tools (e.g. GIS,  basic programming languages, vector/raster illustration and image processing programs), the course revolves around building a collective, heterodox “atlas” of the 3/4 Coast that simultaneously traces its rich historical geographies while orienting us toward alternative futures.