research
Diverse in its expression, my research is collectively understood through its methodologies challenging dominant modes of knowledge production. In employing alternative ways of knowing and immersive representational tools, the resulting projects seek to cultivate a pluriversal understanding of the world. This practice in support of “a world where many worlds fit” (1) is built by creatively interrogating conventional epistemologies—the solutionism and ostensible objectivity of science and engineering, the frequent anthropocentrism of the humanities, and even the universalism of history—through three core methodologies of decentering:
01 engaging human perception as medium in iterative body-schema simulation,
02 engaging the nonhuman as medium in more-than-human narratives, and
03 engaging history as medium in parafictional design research.
Recently, much of this work is based in dynamic visualization, particularly that of real-time engine software and its many products (fully navigable virtual environments, augmented reality, virtual reality, etc), where senses can be extended, time can be remapped, and empathy can be transposed. A multiplicity of worlds is possible.
(1) Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee, Zapatista Army of National Liberation
01
bodily perception as medium
The first line of decentering research is the employment of the computational medium and representational tool of real-time engine software—traditionally used for the production of films and videogames—in thinking about the experience and making of space through an expanded reading of the body. Here the body is understood not only through its material propensities and constraints, but through its larger expression in the mosaics of embodied experience and socio-cultural collective dynamics. This research builds upon the theorization of embodied experience following French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-schema, or bodily way of knowing the world, cultural geographer John Wylie’s definition of landscape as the materialities and sensibilities with which we see, and digital media scholar Brendan Keogh’s “play of bodies” bridging across our shared physical spaces and the virtual landscapes of videogames. Establishing and expanding upon the conclusions that 1) landscape and self are co-constitutive, each dynamically forming and influencing the other through material and immaterial means, and 2) the body can be extended across the physical-virtual divide, real-time engines uniquely provide a new design heuristics of experimental play that recognizes and employs spatial intelligence as sensory, experiential, and contingent in studying and designing the built environment. The virtual worlds crafted through real-time engines offer a novel, prismatic palette of analytical experience that can be used to iteratively, quickly, and effectively work through design ideas, hypotheses, and plans across the physical-virtual divide. (Additionally, a particularly exciting opportunity of this methodology is the ability to design and experience virtual worlds through a nonhuman body, understanding the built environment through the body-schema of other species.)
This research has been presented at various national and international organizations, lead to invitations to present and lead workshops for students internationally and locally, as well as formalized into a book chapter for Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City ("Expanded Phenomenologies: Leveraging Game Engines and Virtual Worlds in Design Research for the Real").
Expanded Phenomenologies: Leveraging Game Engines and Virtual Worlds in Design Research for the Real
Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City
Routledge Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group
editors: Marcus Owens and Dale Leorke
Activist Phenomenologies: Game Engines as Design Research into Diverse Embodiment
Environmental Design Research Association
Cybernetic Phenomenologies: Virtual World-Building as New Body-Schema in Design Research
Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture
Sacramento, CA
02
the nonhuman as medium
The second line of decentering research extends into nonhuman worlds. This work is best represented by my newly published book, Atlas of Material Worlds: Mapping the Agency of Matter for a New Landscape Practice, a highly designed narrative atlas illustrating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives. Employing new materialism as a jumping-off point, it examines the increasingly blurry lines between the organic and inorganic, engaging the following questions: What roles do nonliving materials play? Might a closer examination of those roles reveal an undeniable agency we have long overlooked or disregarded? If so, does this material agency change our understanding of the social structures, ecologies, economies, cosmologies, technologies, and landscapes that surround us? This is the story of the world’s driest nonpolar desert, pink flamingos, and cerulean blue lithium ponds; industrial shipping logistics, pudding-like jiggling substrates, and monuments of mud; galactic bodies, radioactive sheep, and the yellowcake of uranium.
Put simply, this book dares readers to see the world anew, from material up. Though the book is targeting landscape designers and its students, the topics of study are of particular interest to a wide body of disciplines, from anthropology to science and technology studies.
An exhibition enhanced with augmented-reality visualizations in promotion of the book began its tour at UVA's A-School’s Elmaleh Gallery the fall of 2021 and is continuing on to the contributors’ respective institutions (Auburn University, New York University, Ohio State University, etc) and other venues. If you'd like to host a book talk and exhibition please contact Matthew at ms3sy@virginia.edu
03
history as medium
Finally, the third line of research broadens my decentering work into the realm of time, history, and their designed manipulation. With collaborator Kristi Cheramie (Section Head of Landscape Architecture, OSU), our Office of Recovery and Reconciliation project (ORR) utilizes the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927—a historically significant bifurcation point—and unearthed archive materials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ archives to critique the decision making process surrounding the restructuring of the American landscape in the early 20th century and offer an alternative history where control and efficiency are not the only values expressed in the region’s flood control infrastructure. The ORR project thus investigates what it means to ask questions about the past critically and creatively. With an eye toward a just future. The project sees design as tool and history as medium to 1) project both forward and backward in time, 2) work on the formation and decay of space, and 3) explore the sociotechnical imaginaries that shape our landscape. We call this “paraficitional design research.” This method of inquiry seeks to instrumentalize design beyond the binary models of projective proposal or historical research toward a practice where history and its authorial craft are newly engaged as a medium to work upon, utilizing the creative and generative means of design. This wields tremendous power in influencing both present and future relationships between human and nonhuman worlds as history and the writing of history are domains at the formative core of social ideas, realities, and imaginaries. The project thus suggests not only a new pedagogy of landscape history, highlighting the call for diverse voices beyond traditional positions of power (be that a white male historian or an institution like the Army Corps), but one that also explicitly raises the value of studying history through human-land relations (in contrast to simply a survey of historically significant sites). This is a critical understanding of how land and their inhabitants make one another over time: Land not as resource or property or surrounding environment, but as a specific place at a specific time with a specific people.
Understanding and studying history as a malleable, highly relational medium, rather than history as a universal reality, is not only more accurate and revealing of truth, but promotes a pluriverse of many worlds, some that might hold our best bet for a rapidly warming planet, yet to be imagined, yet to be realized. The project has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and select universities, resulted in exhibitions across the country, several articles (Manifest Journal and LUNCH: Mischief), various conference and symposia presentations, and two book chapters (Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories, 2019 and Everyday Ecologies, 2022), with plans for another exhibition and comprehensive book in the near future.
A Monstrous Breach: The Impossible Story of How the Army Corps Leveraged Infrastructure in Melville, Louisiana
MANIFEST Journal, Volume 3: Bigger than Big
Co-author with Kristi Cheramie
After the Flood: The Incredible Lost Projects of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories
Applied Research + Design Press (an imprint of ORO Editions)
co-author: Kristi Cheramie
editors: Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson
After the Great Flood: Recovering Impossible Histories of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Elmaleh Gallery exhibition, UVA School of Architecture
co-author: Kristi Cheramie
