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Prototyping Climate Awarness

By interpreting climate change – a “hyperobject” that exceeds human temporal and spatial capacities to comprehend – into relatable and tangible experiences and phenomena, this landscape installation generates discussions and motivates community infrastructures to combat the climate crisis. The project “Prototyping Climate Awareness” brings together sensing and responsive technologies, physical computation, citizen science, and digital fabrication to construct a landscape installation that explores the possibilities of landscape design, digital art, and cybernetic technologies in raising public awareness of climate change and its impact on socioecological systems. The installation expands the role of architects and landscape architects in the climate adaptation discourse through material-based practices and community engagement. The installation uses digital sensors to monitor an array of climate indicators – CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, ground ozone level, temperature, and humidity – and translate the data into responsive forms and experiences through light, motion, and sound.



Acknowledgement: Some studies are conducted with the UVA Ostanda illuminata and CCUS research group, including Mona El Khafif, Andrew Mondschein, Zihao Zhang, Eric Field, Gaberial Andrade
Intelligence

This ongoing philosophical project concerning intelligence investigates the concept's development and present-day socio-cultural and environmental ramifications in parallel with the advancement of intelligent machines since the mid-20th century.

With the ascendance of machine learning and artificial neural networks, Allen Turing's 1950 question—"Can machines think?"—becomes obsolete today. AI systems are replacing humans in many decision-making processes, including environmental management. Machines become important actors in the co-production of the shared environment.

Since the late 1990s, posthumanism has made its way into 21st-century intellectual life, providing new frameworks to challenge human exceptionalism that underpins many contemporary issues, from systemic racism to climate change. Ideas such as assemblage thinking, actor-network theory (ANT), new materialism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO) transform how agency and intelligence—the individualistic anthropocentric concepts—may be conceptualized in favor of a non-human-centric mode of thinking.

With this posthumanist cognition, the question is not about whether machines can think -- like humans. The question is how we may recognize other forms of intelligence other than humans, which, in itself, is already embedded in an assemblage of more-than-human parts. Is there a different way to conceptualize intelligence outside the human-nonhuman spectrum? What is the role of intelligent machines other than optimization and automation?


Related publications:

Cantrell, Bradley, Zihao Zhang, and Xun Liu. 2021. “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Landscape Architecture.” In , 232–47. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367824259-15.

Zhang, Zihao. 2020. “Cybernetic Environment: A Historical Reflection on System, Design, and Machine Intelligence.” JoDLA Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture 5–2020: 8. https://doi.org/doi:10.14627/537690004.

Zhang, Zihao, and Ben Bowes. 2019. “The Future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Landscape Design: A Case Study in Coastal Virginia, USA.” Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture 4–2019: 2–9. https://doi.org/doi:10.14627/537663001.

Cantrell, Bradley, and Zihao Zhang. 2018. “A Third Intelligence.” Landscape Architecture Frontiers 6 (2): 42–51. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-LAF-20180205.

Cantrell, Bradley, and Zihao Zhang. 2018. “Choreographing Intelligent Agents.” In 107th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, Black Box. https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.107.1.

Zhang, Zihao, and Shurui Zhang. 2020. “The Cybernetic Environment as a New Frontier.” Lunch Journal 14: 149.



Post-digital Landscape

This paper investigates a type of “post-digital” practice that constructs “evidence” instead of“data” and relies on the “narrative-driven” instead of “data-driven” method to influence public opinion. This approach to digital landscape practice addresses the dilemma in the “post-truth era,” in which public opinions are driven by emotion and empathy rather than objectivity and facts. The paper argues for a post-digital culture by cultivating a sense of criticality in designers toward data collection and data-driven methods. With these new conceptual frameworks in understanding data, objectivity, evidence and fact, landscape architects could play an important role in influencing public decision-making by constructing narratives that are needed when humanities are faced with unprecedented social and environmental uncertainties.

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Cite this paper:
Zhang, Zihao. 2022. “Post-Digital Landscape and Post-Digital Culture.” Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture 7–2022 (June): 26–35. https://doi.org/doi:10.14627/537724004.

Thumbnail Image: David Smucker


Cybernetic Environment

Dissertation Defense
April 2020

Full Dissertation

Abstract
This research constructs a field of inquiry – the cybernetic environment – between sciences, engineering, arts, and design. It interrogates and investigates the underlying mode of thought in emerging environmental practices revolving around cybernetic technologies – that is, environmental sensing, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics – in light of contemporary posthumanism cognition and more-than-human ontological concerns across disciplines. Emerging cybernetic practices across fields pose challenges which have been largely understudied, and may transform the ways in which we understand cybernetics, a 70-year-old concept.

In his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Norbert Wiener first publicly used the term “cybernetics” to refer to recursive and self-regulating mechanisms across biological and mechanical systems. Cybernetics positions communication – the exchange of information – at the center of control. This study offers an alternative interpretation of cybernetics – recursive and self-regulating mechanisms – in a non-communicative framework suggested by contemporary posthumanist thought.

This research argues that many concepts in contemporary environmental discourse, such as adaptive management, responsive landscapes, and smart cities, operate within the paradigm of the cybernetic system, but not in the paradigm of the cybernetic environment. They imagine the environment as systems and apply cybernetic thinking to optimize and control them. In contrast, the cybernetic environment paradigm emphasizes that the environment outside a system is not a homogeneous space, but a mesh of objects, assemblages, and mental processes that are withdrawn and reserved from human access. In this framework, which emphasizes the inability to communicate and wield control between objects, cybernetic thinking is no longer about control, but is instead a logic of coexistence with and attuning to more-than-human objects around us. In addition, cybernetic environments become reserves of great open-endedness and futures we cannot now imagine.

Public presentation


Cultivated Wildness: Technodiversity and Wildness in Machines

Journal Article (peer-reviewed) 
April 2021
Authors: Zihao Zhang and Bradley Cantrell

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Abstract
This paper investigates the idea of cultivated wildness at the intersection of landscape design and artificial intelligence. The paper posits that contemporary landscape practices should overcome the potentially single understanding on wilderness, and instead explore landscape strategies to cultivate new forms of wild places via ideas and concerns in contemporary Environmental Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Ecological Sciences, and Landscape Architecture. Drawing cases in environmental engineering, computer science, and landscape architecture research, this paper explores a framework to construct wild places with intelligent machines. In this framework, machines are not understood as a layer of “digital infrastructure” that is used to extent localized human intelligence and agency. Rather machines are conceptualized as active agents who can participate in the intelligence of co-production. Recent developments in cybernetic technologies such as sensing networks, artificial intelligence, and cyberphysical systems can also contribute to establishing the framework. At the heart of this framework is “technodiversity,” in parallel with biodiversity, since a singular vision on technological development driven by optimization and efficiency reinforces a monocultural approach that eliminates other possible relationships to construct with the environment. Thus, cultivated wildness is also about recognizing “wildness” in machines.


Cite this paper

MLA:
Zhang, Zihao, and Bradley Cantrell. “Cultivated Wildness: Technodiversity and Wildness in Machines.” Landscape Architecture Frontiers, vol. 9, Apr. 2021, pp. 52–65. doi:10.15302/J-LAF-1-020040.

Chicago:
Zhang, Zihao, and Bradley Cantrell. 2021. “Cultivated Wildness: Technodiversity and Wildness in Machines.” Landscape Architecture Frontiers 9 (April): 52–65. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-LAF-1-020040.

APA:
Zhang, Z., & Cantrell, B. (2021). Cultivated Wildness: Technodiversity and Wildness in Machines. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 9, 52–65. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-LAF-1-020040



© 2021 Zihao Zhang