Fieldstation Studio: After Images – Mining Media Ecologies
Tutors: Michiel Helbig, Corneel Cannaerts
Campus Sint-Lucas Ghent
Language EN
Engagement Mediating Tactics
Semester 1
INTRODUCTION
Fieldstation Studio (https://fieldstationstudio.org/) explores how architecture and urban design might respond to the proliferation of networked digital technologies and media in our environments. In this expanded notion of media ecologies, we understand digital media as material entities, and we are particularly interested in contemporary shifts and urgencies in post-digital and visual culture.
In a past series of three master studio’s exploring the post-digital condition, we explored the meaning of digital technologies for image making and the resulting visual regime. Under the titles Artificial Images, Building Images and Complicit images, the studios explored the increasing impact of images on architectural culture and practice. For this Mediating Tactics studio, we will extend this work under the title After Images: Mining Media Ecologies, exploring what remains of architecture or what it will become after the proliferation of images and our cultural and technological obsession with images and how we can appropriate extractivist strategies like data mining to produce counter narratives.Deepening the work on the synthetic and material nature of images, in this studio we will expand our disciplinary practices and tools with computational and time-based media to map, trace, navigate and narrate the aftermath of image culture in our technologically saturated environments and pro-actively design speculative architectural reflections or propositions in response. The studio combines theoretical grounding, collective research, hands-on experimentation and speculative cinematic architecture.
VIDEO TRAILER
AFTER IMAGES
We can interpret “after” in different ways to critically examine the contemporary shifts in visual culture and image-making within architecture. In its most literal sense, an afterimage is a visual or sensory impression that remains after the original stimulus has ceased. This metaphor suggests a critical reflection on what persists after our cultural and technological obsession with images—questioning what remains hidden behind these visual surfaces. We are encouraged to explore the vast hidden infrastructures, algorithmic biases, political agendas, economic interests, and ecological costs that sustain contemporary image production and dissemination.
The title after images does not want to suggest that architectural culture is moving beyond its obsession with images but wants to critically examine contemporary changes in visual culture and image making that opens up different potential interpretations. Architecture is still predominantly a visual culture, architects curate their online image, chasing clout through architectural photography and picture-perfect representations. The prefix after takes on a similar role as post in how Florian Cramer defines post-digital, not as the absence of the digital but a “contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has become historical”. [1]
As the speed of image production accelerates through generative AI, architectural images are increasing in fidelity and resolution and realism. The quirky weirdness of early AI experimentation is rapidly giving way to reproducing banal tropes. Images are cheap and don’t require training or cultural insight to produce, leading to vast increases in volume of images produced. All images produced after 2022 are after images, since AI generated images feeding back into the training LLM, are potentially contaminated by AI slop.
Images are not limited to the media artefact themselves, they come tagged with metadata, and are processed, filtered and aggregated through algorithms. All images have become operational, i.e. they are not limited to what they depict but operate as part of technological, economic, political and ecological systems. After the surface of the image lies an array of data, an endless series of algorithms and a vast hidden infrastructure: platforms, data centres, cables, satellites…
The overload and saturation of images inevitably raise questions about what comes “after.” What are the mental and physical consequences of perpetual visual overstimulation, and how might architectural culture evolve beyond image obsession? As architects operating within this media ecology, it is crucial not only to recognize the unseen forces that govern contemporary visual culture but also to proactively engage them, critically navigating and shaping new realities through speculative architectural reflections and propositions.
MINING MEDIA ECOLOGIES
Digital technologies have been deeply affecting architectural practice and culture, as architecture is increasingly designed, constructed and experienced through digital media, which are technically speaking images. We can trace the interests of architects in the digital from formal exploration with digital modelling software, over prototypical experimentation with digital fabrication and material articulation to the recent ventures into data driven design. However, the predominately instrumental approach of digital technologies left architecture largely blind to the deep societal, environmental and cultural impact of digital technologies. Our houses, cities and environments have become saturated with digital technologies, to such a degree that they impact all aspects of our lives and are more noted by their absence then their presence. Through social media, image and video sharing platforms, digital technologies are deeply impacting cultural production and consumption. While these emerging technologies have become inextricably interwoven in the very fabric of our environments and permeate our visual cultures, general architectural practices seem to lack the capacities and tools, or even willingness, to engage this ubiquitous technological layer.
Within media arts and more avant-garde architectural and design practices there is more willingness to directly engage with the post-digital condition outlined above. Sam Lavinge has developed scrapism as an artistic and technical practice to reveal and critique hidden power relations in online platforms and technical systems. Scrapism is the practice of automatically accessing and downloading data from websites beyond their intended use. It is appropriating methods and practices used by technology companies and governments for commercial and surveillance purposes. The work uses automation to process vast amounts of data, ranging from text and metadata to images and video. The downloaded data is structured and represented in a format that allows users to navigate these data sets and to present counter-narratives.
As architectural practice shifts from drawing to image, designers confront not only new visual tools, but the broader systems that shape them. The platforms we now rely on—from rendering engines to BIM software—are not neutral, but embedded in infrastructures entangled with capital, extraction, and computation. The History of BIM map reveals the influence of investment giants like BlackRock and Vanguard—also major players in fossil fuel, military, and surveillance industries. Joanie Lemercier’s Autodesk.Earth exposes how companies like Autodesk are directly implicated in coal mining, deforestation, and climate-impacting practices. These tools, often seen as benign or purely virtual, are deeply complicit in the ecological and political crises we face. Rather than reject them, this studio seeks to extend the architectural toolbox to critically engage these systems. Through techniques from media arts and computational design—scraping, scripting, animating, visualizing—we claim agency over the infrastructures that shape our work. Inspired by Sy Taffel’s call for postgrowth media ecologies, we aim to move beyond instrumental, growth-driven design toward modes that foreground care, critique, and complexity.
CINEMATIC ARCHITECTURE
When rendering the data resulting from the machinic operations visual, through computational techniques we can extend our understanding of the complexities and entanglement shaping our environments. As Benjamin Bratton argues, our understanding of climate change results from new sensory apparatus such as satellite imagery and earth observation technologies and the climate models enabled through planetary computation. He calls for a new cinematography that uses this geo cinematic apparatus, not to produce a singular master image, but a multitude of possible compositions. In doing so, computational cinema allows us to actively engage with the visual culture resulting from the proliferation of digital technologies and enables us to see our world and ourselves differently.
The impact of computation is not just affecting the sensorial apparatus, the proliferation of cameras, scanners and other sensory devices that capture our world as data, but the whole process of cinematography, from production, editing to displaying and consumption of visual media. Through software like 3D animation, vfx and game engines, cinema has become volumetric. The linear sequence of two-dimensional images is just one way in which spatial data contained in video can be rendered visual. David Rudnick argues that this extended understanding of cinema is more than other artistic media capable of depicting our contemporary condition, which he calls ultra reality.
As spatial designers engaged in conceiving our environment as inherently dynamic and changing, architects are well positioned to take on the spatiotemporal potential offered by computational cinema. Within Fieldstation studio we work extensively with computational, time based and narrative media, to extend the architectural toolbox and to directly engage the new visual regime of post-digital media ecologies. The media we use range from data scraping, working with found footage, integrating video or images from social media into four dimensional models, to processing various data types and metadata, through rendering, data visualisation, animation and post-production. We will introduce students to these techniques to develop a critical position towards the saturation of our environments with digital technologies.
Cinematic Architecture points to using cinematic ways of bringing a spatial narrative or a travelogue into a film, such as panning, zooming, tilting, traveling, desktop documentary, and walk-through techniques, to name just a few. Creating a Cinematic Architecture from an architectural perspective means spatially deconstructing and reinterpreting the existing context by way of a moving image and montage. The goal is to expand and spatialize the existing reality through a critical reading, questioning the relationship between objects, data, contexts, and (architectural) spaces.
COURSE STRUCTURE
The After Images: Mining Media Ecologies studio investigates how architects can critically engage with the accelerated visual culture and the complex economic, political, and ecological infrastructures that underlie architectural image by appropriating data mining as a design strategy to expose, navigate, and reimagine contemporary media ecologies.
We will do this in three parallel threads each with their own output, building up to a layered reflection and faceted project. We will mainly work in teams of 3, but also as a collective with explicit individual contributions;
(1) MEDIAGRAM
We will start the research by mapping and diagramming a series of reference images we have selected because they reveal urgencies and issues and subtopics related to the studio. This research will result in a mediagram that traces the mediality (technicality and materiality), mediation (content and medium) and media ecology (context and relationality) of the images.
>> Groups of 2-3 students will do a deep dive into one reference image and relate texts, subtopics and media resources we have prepared. These mediagrams reveal the operation of the image and different dimensions described above and form the basis for taking a critical position towards after images and developing a project.
(2) TUTORIALS
Students get access to a series of tutorials, that introduce data mining and using media ecologies as a resource in design, through hands-on experimentation with computational techniques such as web scraping, image processing and computer vision and data visualisation, and narrative media such as animation and video.
>> The technologies and methodologies taught through these tutorials will consist of small individual exercises resulting in a collective mapping of the digital footprint of the studio.
(3) PROJECT
Starting from the research and fieldguides, the groups of 3 students will develop a speculative project using data collected through data mining, and translate their reflections on and position towards the topic of after images into cinematic and architectural constructs and design propositions. The (non)site, scale, nature and scope of these projects will result from the research and design process.
>> The final project will take the form of a video essay, a travelogue exploring a speculative cinematic architecture. The medium of cinema will be investigated and used as an extension of traditional architectural media, allowing to think and design in different time frames, perspectives and spatial dimensions. The cinematic architecture designed for and explored in the video will ultimately be translated again to a drawing, a render or a collage, trying to compress the entanglements and complexities into one after image.
SYLLABUS
Coming soon…
STUDENT WORK
REFERENCES
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[1] Cramer, Florian. 2015. “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?” In Postdigital Aesthetics, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 12–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437204_2.
[2] Halpern, Orit. 2018. “Golden Futures.” Limn, no. 10 (May), 107–107.
[3] Unknown Fields, eds. 2016. “Never Never Lands”, Tales from the Dark Side of the City. London: AA Publications.
[4] Taffel, Sy. 2023. “Data and Oil: Metaphor, Materiality and Metabolic Rifts.” New Media & Society 25 (5): 980–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211017887.