Art, Media, and Planetary Futures

You are the interpreter — the signal passes through your hands, your lens, your code. You will become the translator between the living world and the digital realm, listening through sensors, building new ways for the planet to be seen and heard. The climate emergency is no longer abstract—it’s embedded in every search query, every post, every stream of data pulsing through servers and cooling systems that consume power and water to keep the cloud alive. Art, Media, and Planetary Futures is a joint Media Arts + Creative Entrepreneurship (CENT) studio for students who want to turn that awareness into creative research and design. In this course, you’ll expand your understanding of media—not just screens and stories, but satellites, sensors, servers, and signals: every device through which the planet perceives itself. You’ll plan drone-mapping missions, work with LiDAR and aerial photogrammetry, interpret satellite imagery, and build interactive 3D models that translate environmental and computational systems into visual, sonic, and spatial forms.

Art works at the threshold of perception, mediating between material and social systems to reveal what feels meaningful to us. Media extends human perception through satellites, sensors, servers, and signals—the tools of investigative research by which we construct a world, even as the planet carries on, biospheric and indifferent. Planetary Futures trace the continuum between technology, ecology, and imagination, asking how the infrastructures we build today shape the climates and cultures of tomorrow.