TOWARDS SENTIENCE

TOWARDS SENTIENCE

Research by Leif Estrada

Los Angeles

Towards Sentience incorporates the design of a robotic machine, which will attune the fluvial morphology of the LA River through a series of real-time sensing and responsive manipulations as a way to curate the projective successions of the river—constantly altering and modifying the riverine landscape, privileging the evolution of ecological processes over static constructions.

The machine will learn from initial site conditions of the LA River, but also from the modifications it will produce independently.  The landscape machine will eventually become sentient, through learning from its environments, iteratively honing on specific operational processes:

to erode the existing concrete lining; 

to attenuate flows of water and sediment in order to accrete new temporal landforms;

to infiltrate the subterranean arid landscape of LA and charge new aquifers;

and to predict the successive planting that would endure the projective new Nature of the river.

Sentient-ly, it will attune the fluvial landscape—to a level of degree that man is incapable of processing to respond and modify the landscape in real-time.  Projective-ly, sentient machines will be created to aide landscape architects and designers to address human’s incapability to negotiate complexities that occur in real-time, which necessitates immediate responses.  Through this new imagined sensory, it will enable the emergence of new forms of landscape, which was not possible without the machine’s new dimensions of sentience.

Research credits:

with the support of Harvard University’s Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL), and the Urban Theory Lab

under the advisement of Professors Bradley Cantrell (University of Virginia – Landscape Architecture Chair) and Neil Brenner (University of Chicago – Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology)

Photography: Robert Tangstrom