MArch II

Instruments of Terrestrial Transformation

Advised by Andrew Witt

Ecological design, through devices of memory, function through projective mediums, as drawings, models, or simulations. Cyberinfrastructures installed by organizations like NASA’s Earth Observation System Data Infrastructure system and the United States Geological Survey provide measurements and information by remote sensing devices that are instrumentalized to visualize ecological systems.

Bachelard states, “As a materialized noumenon, the instrument sits in the center of the epistemic ensemble” as an epistemology or theory of knowledge the instrument of terrestrial transformation organizes as an ensemble in a spatial information system, ontological flows of creation. Ontologically, interdisciplinarily, the architecture of ecology flows from abstract descriptive languages that are quantitative, statistical, and ideal and into materiality as geometry in its proportions delineates architectural, landscape, and urban construction in simultaneity.

Movements of information generate terms of virtuality for the mind to navigate through a composition durable of increased complexity in circulating content. The spatial information system, composes through structures and sequences, alignments and interdimensional connections.

Real worlds, conceptual worlds and geospatial worlds are bridged through the arrangement of languages. Instruments of simulation discretize and segment information to replicate or imitate a behavior process and identify causal relationships within.

A network of these instruments at an international scale would form an informational basis from which collaboration may happen in response to the cumulative analysis datascape.

In the envisioning deep futures in the nurturing of imagination by computation, perhaps the visions of the instrument are realizations of dreams or fantasy, bridging worlds of imagination and built reality at the scale of ecology.