REFRAMING MEDIA ECOLOGIES
Individual master dissertation studio 2026-27
Supervisors: Michiel Helbig, Corneel Cannaerts
PhD students: Weronika Gajda, Alma Grossen, Lena Geerts Danau
Campus: Ghent
Language: EN
Max number of students: 6
ABSTRACT
Our built environments are increasingly entangled with networked digital technologies, transforming the city into a complex media ecology where sensors, cloud infrastructures, and algorithmic interfaces actively produce rather than merely represent urban space. As architectural practice shifts from traditional orthographic drawing to real-time, data-driven simulation and automated processing, it risks surrendering the shaping of our environments to the opaque logic of corporate tech monopolies. The Reframing Media Ecologies master dissertation studio challenges the assumed neutrality of these digital infrastructures by investigating the “epistemic frictions” that arise when embodied physical experiences are translated into computable, transscalar data. Utilizing speculative design media, critical making, and experimental counter-mapping, students are invited to develop new time-based and representational practices that expose the operational systems shaping the post-digital landscape. Through individual projects aligned with ongoing research trajectories—whether deploying custom digital toolkits to map the hidden sociotechnical networks of Ghent, developing architectural methods to decode the colonized atmospheric territory of the sky, or visualizing the extractive cloud operations driving large-scale logistical hubs like the Port of Antwerp—students will critically redefine the agency of the architect within contemporary media ecologies.
CONTEXT
This Master dissertation studio will be taught within framework of Fieldstation Studio and the Media Ecologies Research cell. Fieldsation 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, we conduct research within the Media Ecologies cell, that is part of the Material Narratives Research Group, and host three PhD projects Citography (Werokia Gajda), Territory, Imaginary, Ecology – a Critical Cartography of the Sky (Alma Grossen) and Digital ecologies. Remediating landscape transformations (Lena Geerts Danau). Additionally we have been active at several international universities and institutions, 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 research 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.
REFRAMING MEDIA ECOLOGIES
Our environments are becoming increasingly saturated with networked digital technologies. Cameras, tracking devices, sensors and scanners are constantly mapping our environments, activities and behaviours. People are increasingly sharing all aspects of their lives through blogging, social media, image and video sharing platforms. The vast amount of information gathered by these technologies and platforms is not limited to the media artefacts themselves, it is tagged with metadata, processed and filtered through algorithms, forming a hyperlinked graph, an ecology of connected data. This increasing amount of image data is no longer a passive representation of our environment but is actively informing and steering how we design, inhabit and maintain urban environments.
The development of novel ways of seeing, sensing and imaging have the potential of changing the collective consciousness across scale and timeframes. Unlike the infamous examples of the Earth Rise and Blue Marble images, contemporary visual regimes produce not a single master image of our world but a plethora of overlapping frames, imaging various spectra at different resolutions. The vast amount of images produced makes it impossible for humans to see and process, while humans are consuming images at an accelerating speed and volume, this visual stream is algorithmically filtered and curated. Images have become operational, they have become technical images that mainly function as part of machinic operations rather than representing or depicting something for human understanding.
Architectural practice and culture, while being biased towards the visual, seem to have a hard time to respond to the rapid shifts in visual culture resulting from networked digital technologies. While digital design media mimic drawings and photographs they have effectively become images that can be processed, calculated, filtered, tagged and manipulated, endlessly duplicated and transmitted, and are inherently dynamic and transformable. This shift from orthography to postorthography trades a slow and historical consciousness, which uses hand-mechanical drawing to trace the past, for a statistical consciousness that operates in real time, simulating all probable future states simultaneously. This automation does not merely simulate architectural ideas; it automates the process of thinking itself, reducing design to a real-time calculation of efficiency and performance. How can architects reframe contemporary visual culture by developing new computational, time-based, and representational practices that reveal and engage the operational media ecologies shaping the built environment?
As architects we can learn from practices in media arts, creative coding, data visualisation, post-photography and audio-visual media that critically engage with the abundance of digital images and data as material directly. These practices reframe contemporary image production, questioning dominant visual culture, developing counternarratives and strategies of appropriation. As spatial designers engaged with the built environment, our urgency to adopt these strategies stems from the realization that computational images are no longer passive reflections of space, but active infrastructural agents that regulate, organize, and produce it. If architecture ignores this telematic shift, we surrender the shaping of our environments to the black boxes of automated processing and corporate tech monopolies.
CASE STUDIES
Students can choose to work on case studies developed within the ongoing PhD projects, research projects and studios of Fieldstation Studio, or develop a personal project within the research agenda of media ecologies research cell.
Citography – Epistemic friction between mapping and tool-making
Digital technologies increasingly shape how contemporary cities are experienced, recorded, and governed. However, conventional architectural mapping often treats digital data as a neutral reflection of reality, overlooking how spatial knowledge is actively co-produced by the devices, platforms, and interfaces we use. This case study introduces Citography, a design-driven research approach framing the city as a technologically mediated condition. For this master dissertation, students are tasked explicitly with deploying, testing, and adapting the Citographer Toolkit—a modular suite of custom data-processing and mapping tools—within the urban fabric of Ghent. Rather than viewing the city merely through its historical architecture, students will map Ghent as a digital media ecology. They will investigate the “epistemic frictions” that occur when embodied experiences in tourist-dense areas, university transit corridors, or camera monitored zones are translated into data-driven representations. GPS coordinate or a smartphone photo is never “raw”; it is conditioned by sensor constraints, algorithmic compression, API limits, and platform terms of service. By treating tool-making as a critical, epistemic practice rather than a mere technical step, students will use the Toolkit to expose the invisible digital networks that dictate visibility and access in Ghent. Rather than smoothing over the glitches, gaps, and discontinuities in digital datasets, this studio uses them as primary evidence. Through rigorous testing and iterative refinement of the Citographer Toolkit, students will negotiate the friction between the physical scale of the human body and scaleless cloud infrastructures, producing critical cartographies that reveal the sociotechnical architectures governing contemporary public space.
Territory, Imaginary, Ecology – A Critical Cartography of the Sky (Alma Grossen)
This case study proposes shifting the architectural gaze toward what is conventionally left unfocused: the sky above Ghent. Historically a social field, elemental medium, and projection plane for human aspiration, the sky has increasingly been colonized by the technosphere, transformed into an operational hinterland governed by property rights and navigation. Contemporary media ecologies—driven by computational platforms, navigation interfaces, and live satellite feeds—have flattened the complex, three-dimensional spatial field of the atmosphere into a scalable data surface. This datafication hides the non-scalable, situated dimensions of the sky, rendering the relationship between our “sky imaginary” and the physical atmospheric territory illegible. This dissertation challenges that flattening by asking students to conceptualize and map the atmosphere as a tangible, three-dimensional architectural typology. Treating the atmosphere as a hyperobject that resists singular spatial readings, students will investigate the “transscalar” operations that occur simultaneously within it—how varying scalar logics create spatial tension and cognitive events. We will ask: Which sky is private? Where does airspace begin? Who controls the sky, and how do we navigate it within the urban tissue? By developing a critical cartography, students will decode these mediating systems to make the gap between digital encoding and physical experience spatially legible. The ultimate goal is to reactivate the architectural gaze, moving away from the totalitarian, automated machine eye toward an embodied, phenomenological understanding of the contemporary atmosphere, repopulating the seemingly empty airspace above the city with semiotic density and architectural meaning.
Digital Ecologies – Remediating Landscape Transformations (Lena Geerts Danau)
Cartography is often perceived as an objective instrument, yet it is deeply subjective, constructed from specific perspectives and power structures that do not merely represent reality, but actively produce it. Historically rooted in colonial practices of land demarcation and exploitation, this logic of classification has evolved from early 20th-century aerial photography into contemporary remote sensing and computational technologies. Today, the Earth is translated through sensors into numerical data. Drawing on the concept of geomedia, the landscape is increasingly reduced to raster data where each pixel is assigned a specific calculable value. This selective “geometry of power” marks certain areas as ecologically or economically valuable while others disappear into abstraction, rendering the world as discrete entities optimized for extraction and management. This case study focuses on the Port of Antwerp to investigate these dynamics. The port is not a neatly defined administrative zone; it is a sprawling, unbounded network of industrial, logistical, and digital infrastructures whose “area of influence” extends far beyond its physical footprint on a cadastral map. Increasingly, the port is governed by digital systems, including a real-time “digital twin” that actively optimizes and steers the region through data. In this tension between physical reality and digital simulation, landscapes are decoupled from their actual geolocation and assigned new, operational values in the cloud. This dissertation investigates how these cartographic systems produce spatial knowledge, dictating what remains visible and what is erased, thereby contributing to ecological and spatial inequality. Students will explore how maps can function as critical instruments rather than mere representations, developing experimental cartographies that move beyond bounded territories to visualize the broad networks, hidden impact zones, and invisible infrastructures shaping the post-digital landscape.
EXPECTED OUTCOME
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 Reframing Media Ecologies 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.
Lead image: Animated .gif of previous master dissertations, Fieldstation Studio 2023