Fieldstation Studio: AFTER IMAGES

AFTER IMAGES

Supervisors: Michiel Helbig, Corneel Cannaerts
Campus Sint-Lucas Ghent
Language: EN
Individual master dissertation studio, max. 6 students

Fieldstation Studio 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 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. As we are shifting from representation to simulation, synthetic images are replacing drawings as architecture’s main medium for design, and through blurring material and digital realms, digital images are increasingly present in how we envision, inhabit and materialise the built environment. Moreover, all images have become operational, i.e. in addition to the content they depict, they operate in technological, political, societal and ecological systems, and they are complicit in shaping contemporary post-digital media ecologies. For this master dissertation studio, we will extend this work under the title After Images, exploring what remains of architecture or what it will become after the proliferation of images and our cultural and technological obsession with images.

Description of the project:

Fieldstation Studio (https://fieldstationstudio.org/) is a speculative architectural design studio run by Michiel Helbig and Corneel Cannaerts, it is a node in the international Fieldstations Network, exploring architecture in relation to the contemporary complexities, resulting from the Anthropocene and the proliferation of digital technologies. We are organised as an academic design office, combining teaching, academic research and artistic practice. The studio is based at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, but has taught studios and workshops internationally, at the B-Pro Master program of the Bartlett School of Architecture University College London and the Advanced Architectural Design program at GSAPP Columbia University New York. The studio focuses on the agency of emerging technologies and phenomena, and their impact on the culture and practice of architecture and the environment in which we operate as architects. We propose an explorative architectural design studio, aiming to investigate the potential of architecture as a medium to disrupt, explore and raise questions. The academic design office combines explorative research with hands-on architectural design exercises, field trips and workshops.

The built reality is only one layer that makes up the environments we inhabit, it is influenced by other material and immaterial layers, and it contributes to larger economic, material, environmental, informational and infrastructural systems. Within the Fieldstation Studio we see this expanded field, this constantly changing, layered, hybrid and compressed environment as the context that architecture operates in and actively engages with. We are particularly interested in the proliferation of digital technologies within the environment and the media ecologies resulting from them. We think that architects should proactively engage the complex reality of today rather than passively wait for design briefs and projects. Fieldstation Studio trains students in taking positions within contemporary fields and provides them with a platform for developing their future practice. Our weapons of choice are design fiction, spatial narratives, speculative media, imagineering, cinematic architecture, hacking and critical making.

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”.

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 centers, cables, satellites…

Architectural culture remains deeply fixated on images—constantly pursuing the ultimate image, the perfect representation, the viral moment. Architects and designers actively chase clout through picture-perfect renders and stylized photography, which circulate as currency within digital networks. Images become commodities mined from digital ecologies, with their value quantified in likes, shares, and followers. This endless pursuit points toward an economy in which seemingly trivial or “dumb” data, early digital glitches, or images of lost or destroyed sites gain cultural significance and economic value over time.

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.

Expected output:

We invite students to develop an in individual master dissertation project and we provide a platform for students to develop their own interests, skills and projects, situated within a reflection on After Images as defined above. The topic of the dissertation fits within the proposed context, the choice of media, and the nature of the dissertation, both to be consistent with the chosen topic. The first semester is used to define a framework for the projects, develop the necessary skills, and define the project brief, and runs in parallel with the studio in the first master. The second semester focuses on the dissertation project itself. We regularly invite guests and former students to critique and guide the work. Students need to have excellent design skills and have an interest in the critical and practical application of digital technologies in architectural design. Students get access to several tools and tutorials developed by the Academic Design Office.

We are looking for students from Mediating Tactics, that preferably have been part of Fieldstation studios or research electives. Students should combine strong academic and design skills, with a particular focus on using speculative design media!

An overview of past master dissertations and studios can be found here:

http://www.fieldstationstudio.org/STUDIO/UMWELT/

http://www.fieldstationstudio.org/STUDIO/ALGORITHMIC_VISION/

http://www.fieldstationstudio.org/STUDIO/DECODING_ARCHIVES/

https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/fieldstation-22/

https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/fieldstation-23-24/

https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/fieldstation-complicit-images/

https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/fieldstation-24-25/

References/Further reading:

Cournet, Paul, Negar Sanaan Bensi, and Delft University of Technology. 2023. Datapolis: Exploring the Footprint of Data on Our Planet and Beyond. TU Delft OPEN Publishing. https://doi.org/10.59490/mg.91.

Halpern, Orit. 2018. “Golden Futures.” Limn, no. 10 (May), 107–107.

Jung, Maximilian. 2025. “Digital Capitalism Is a Mine Not a Cloud | Transnational Institute.” March 29, 2025. https://www.tni.org/en/article/digital-capitalism-is-a-mine-not-a-cloud.

Kurgan, Laura. 2013. Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books.

Mattern, Shannon. 2015. Deep Mapping the Media City: Vol. 5. Forerunners. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452958491.

Önal, Gökçe. 2021. “Media Ecologies of the ‘Extractive View.’” FOOTPRINT. https://doi.org/10.59490/FOOTPRINT.14.2.4694.

Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Electronic Mediations, volume 46. Minneapolis, Minn. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Parikka, Jussi.. 2023. Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, eds. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. The Geopolitics of Information. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2023. Machine Vision: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We See the World. Polity Press.

Ruotsalainen, Juho, and Sirkka Heinonen. 2015. “Media Ecology and the Future Ecosystemic Society.” European Journal of Futures Research 3 (1): 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40309-015-0068-7.

Schuppli, Susan. 2020. Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The MIT Press.

Scolari, Carlos A. 2012. “Media Ecology: Exploring the Metaphor to Expand the Theory.” Communication Theory 22 (2): 204–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2012.01404.x.

Shapiro, Judith. 2021. Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance. Edited by John-Andrew McNeish. Routledge Studies of the Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development. Taylor & Francis.

Taffel, Sy. 2013. “Scalar Entanglement in Digital Media Ecologies.” in NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. https://doi.org/10.25969/MEDIAREP/15082.

Taffel, Sy. 2019. Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware. New York, [New York] London Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic.

Taffel, Sy. 2023. “Data and Oil: Metaphor, Materiality and Metabolic Rifts.” New Media & Society 25 (5): 980–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211017887.

Unknown Fields Division. 2016. Tales of the Dark Side of the City. Edited by Architectural Association London. London: AA Publications.

Reference for the image (if necessary):

(Animated .gif of previous master dissertations, Fieldstation Studio 2023)