Planetary Futures Lab | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Who we are

The Planetary Futures Lab is a research and media studio at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The Lab develops and applies new techniques for documenting landscapes under stress — combining remote sensing, geospatial analysis, immersive media, and cinematic research. Our team includes artists, filmmakers, geospatial researchers, spatial programmers, and students.

We work in the tradition of forensic spatial practice: reading landscapes as records, and making what they contain legible.

The Lab grew out of a multi-year Arctic research partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL).

The Lab operates as MCAD's platform for research at planetary scale — and as a working studio that takes on real projects with real consequences.

What we do

Our methods include drone-based LiDAR, photogrammetry, terrestrial 3D capture, immersive video, binaural audio, VR, satellite and remote sensing analysis, GIS, and cinematic field research.

We work in landscapes — Arctic permafrost, Midwestern rivers, sites of energy and extraction, the physical and hydrological infrastructure of artificial intelligence — and back in the studio, where field captures become digital twins, films, maps, and evidence.

We approach that question the way a forensic investigator approaches a site — with rigorous methods, verifiable data, and a commitment to making spatial relationships visible that would otherwise remain abstract or inaccessible.

We don't just document what's there. We reconstruct what happened, model what's coming, and build the tools to communicate both.

How the Lab came to be

The Planetary Futures Lab was founded on the methodological foundation of the Defense Resiliency Platform Against Extreme Cold Weather (DRP), a $17M U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research program led at MCAD in partnership with CRREL, Virginia Tech, Stony Brook University, the University of Minnesota, the University of North Dakota and the Arctic Data Center at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), UCSB.

Working across Alaska — in Nome, Point Lay, Utqiaġvik, and at the CRREL Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility — MCAD students and faculty in close collaboration with community partners who hold generational knowledge of these landscapes. The fieldwork produced a working pipeline for spatial evidence: time-series LiDAR, drone photogrammetry, terrestrial scanning, immersive video, and GIS integration.

The Lab is what we built to keep going.

A course, a cohort, a working studio

The Lab runs a course — ES/MA 3803 Art, Media, and Planetary Futures — that doubles as the Lab's working cohort. Students don't learn tools in simulation; they use them on active research projects alongside the Lab's director and research team.

The course covers drone operation, LiDAR, photogrammetry, GIS, immersive capture, and cinematic editing. Students leave with portfolio-ready work and experience inside a studio operating at the intersection of spatial science, forensic methodology, and cinematic practice.

Three people stand in a field with a drone hovering overhead

Current & Emerging Research Directions

Arctic infrastructure and permafrost thaw
AI infrastructure and landscape
Fragile biomes and hydrological systems

Get Involved

For students

Take the course. Apprentice on a project. Build a portfolio that demonstrates real research capacity.

For partners and collaborators

Commission research. Co-author a project. Host a visiting fellow. Bring us your landscape.

For supporters

The Lab is building toward a multi-year program of climate-and-AI research at planetary scale. We are currently developing projects with ProgramEarth, Google.org, AGOG, and the Minnesota Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).

Support the Lab — srowell@mcad.edu

Steve Rowell

Associate Professor of Creative Entrepreneurship & Director, Planetary Futures Lab

Steve Rowell is an artist and researcher whose work combines documentary filmmaking with remote sensing to visualize landscape change. He directs the Planetary Futures Lab and founded Planetary Spatial LLC, where he led digital twin development for the Defense Resiliency Platform, a $17M U.S. Army Corps program documenting permafrost infrastructure in Arctic Alaska. With 25 years working in relational aesthetics and experimental geography, he spent 12 years at the Center for Land Use Interpretation and is a Guggenheim Fellow. His honors also include a McKnight Media Artist Fellowship and a Creative Capital Award. He holds an MFA with Distinction from the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of Minnesota, Kansas City Art Institute, and ArtCenter College of Design.

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Olaf Kuhlke

Professor & Chair, Creative Entrepreneurship; Lead Investigator, Defense Resiliency Platform.

Olaf Kuhlke holds a PhD in cultural geography from Kent State University, has taught both in geography and creative/cultural entrepreneurship programs, and co-founded the BA program in Cultural Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where he taught for 20 years prior to coming to MCAD in 2022. At MCAD, he led the redevelopment of the entrepreneurial studies program to a Bachelor of Science program in Creative Entrepreneurship that is launching in the fall of 2023. Olaf is also a consultant and entrepreneur, working with BIPOC organizations across the country to implement creative entrepreneurship training programs for community members, and provides workshops on startups, workplace culture, mental health, and trauma-informed entrepreneurship.

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