L. C. Dillenback Lecture
Andrew Madl
Assistant professor, School of Landscape Architecture, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Public Lecture: Infrastructural Fictions: Landscape, Technology, and Consequences
What happens when landscape architecture turns its attention to the technological systems that quietly organize contemporary life? Infrastructural Fictions examines speculative design and computational media as methods for investigating technological infrastructures whose spatial, ecological, and cultural consequences often extend far beyond their visible boundaries.
Spanning nuclear infrastructure, DNA data storage, and emerging technologies, the work explores how research can be transformed into constructed worlds that make otherwise abstract systems tangible. The Nuclear Chronicles traces the landscapes of the United States’ nuclear weapons complex through a graphic novel, film, exhibition, and collection of speculative environments, using fiction and representation to reveal relationships between technology, territory, ecology, and culture. Wild Data, an ongoing book project, investigates the emerging possibility of encoding digital information within plant DNA and traces the spatial and ecological consequences of transforming forests, agricultural fields, and planted landscapes into infrastructures for data storage.
Together, these projects position representation not simply as a means of depicting landscapes, but as a method of research and speculation. Through mapping, computational modeling, simulation, animation, and worldbuilding, the work asks how landscape architecture might engage infrastructure as material for speculation—making its hidden operations visible while giving spatial form to its potential consequences.
graduate workshop review: Operational Atmospheres: Computational Worldbuilding through Environmental Sensing
September 28, 5 p.m., Slocum Atrium
Contemporary landscapes are increasingly defined not only by their physical form, but by the invisible streams of information, energy, and environmental processes that continuously shape them. From sensor networks and geospatial positioning to atmospheric conditions and embodied movement, landscapes operate as dynamic systems of data exchange that challenge conventional modes of representation.
This workshop introduces TouchDesigner as a platform for translating environmental sensing into computational space. Rather than treating digital tools as instruments of visualization alone, participants will construct representational systems that transform environmental measurements into spatial behavior. Using mobile sensors, geolocation, and procedural workflows, students will generate computational landscapes in which movement, orientation, and environmental conditions become active spatial parameters.
2026-27 Design Research Workshop Series
The theme of the ’26–’27 workshops, “LIVING TECTONICS: On the Agency of Computation and Material Latency” frames design as an active negotiation between the unseen computational intelligence of form and the physical feedback of matter. Moving away from traditional notions of static building or deterministic construction, this workshop series investigates how agency operates across multiple registers: the agency of form through deep topological re-coding; the agency of data in simulating dynamic landscapes; the agency of material chemistry through bio-inspired substance; and the agency of robotic assembly where real-time execution generates visceral spatial affects.
