CRUNCH: Just Models – Playing Nature

Will games and other digital preoccupations soon become the stuff of computational luxury? Despite some efforts towards sustainable computing, the gaming industry and its corollaries continue to push for ever more photorealistic and data-intensive representations of the world around us.  

This talk uses 3D asset libraries to argue that the pathways by which natural models show up in games, cinema and architecture remain largely invisible and under-theorised. How might a closer attention to modelling – specifically, natural modelling in the worlds of digital games – encourage us to reevaluate our relationships to electronic artifacts and the biosphere? Furthermore, it questions whether these traditional models will become obsolete in a new era of ‘computational photogrammetry’, as described by media theorist Brooke Belisle, where photographic scans create seemingly fully realised 3D renderings of captured space. 

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. 

Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. Doors close at 18:40. 

Speaker biographies

Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Chang’s work has appeared in numerous journals, among them Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Qui Parle, electronic book review, Feminist Media Histories, and Resilience. Her first book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), developed environmentally informed frameworks for understanding and designing digital games. At UCSB, Chang co-directs Wireframe, a studio promoting collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global social and environmental justice. She is also a founding co-editor of the UC Press open-access journal, Media+Environment. 

Lucia Pietroiusti is Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London. As a curator, programmer and organisational strategist, she works at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, often outside of the exhibition space. Ecologies at Serpentine is a holistic initiative and purpose-led department aimed at embedding environmental responsibility throughout the organisation’s infrastructure, operations, networks and programming. Pietroiusti was the founder of Serpentine’s General Ecology project, and the curator of Sun & Sea (Lithuanian Pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale and ongoing tour). Together with Filipa Ramos, she is the curator of Songs for the Changing Seasons (Vienna Climate Biennale, 2024); Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdeïna, 2022) and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (research, festival, podcast and publication series). Pietroiusti is also a curator of Sites of… Practice (E-WERK Luckenwalde, 2024), Back to Earth (Serpentine, 2020-22), and Infinite Ecologies Marathon (2023-24). Recent publications include More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier) and Microhabitable (with Fernando García-Dory). 

Déborah López Lobato is an Associate Professor (Teaching) at The Bartlett School of Architecture where she leads Research Cluster 1 in the B-Pro (Bartlett Prospective) programme entitled ‘Monumental Wastelands’, focusing on the themes of ‘cli-migration’ and ‘autonomous ecologies’, at local and planetary scales. She is interested in climate fiction and environmental storytelling. She is the co-founder of Pareid, an interdisciplinary architecture and design research studio, addressing topics related to climate, ecology, human perception, machine sentience, and their capacity for altering current modes of existence through imminent fictions. 

More information

Image: Quixel, ‘Megascan Trees’.