Epochal Atlas

Final Project Brief

Overview

The final project entails the creation of an atlas guiding an imagined reader/viewer through the epoch you or your group has chosen (using an alternative ‘cene from a scholarly source or an invented term of your own). The central piece for your atlas will be a new, multi-part scenographic map (in the style of the “Detonator” landscapes from Tsing et al’s Feral Atlas), accompanied by an original written narrative. You will also incorporate a range of revised/edited media and text from your Epochal Constellation, including i) revised iterations of your original drawings; ii) archival media; and iii) quotations and references to scholarly literature and journalism.

Given that your alternative ‘cene takes a particular perspective on the dominant forces, agents, and dynamics of the Anthropocene, your atlas should present an argument with a clear, compelling cartographic narrative conveyed through a combination of writing, maps, visual artifacts, drawings, and other forms of spatial media. Consider your atlas as a medium for telling a complex but cogent geographic story — a story which will demand a diverse set of media and techniques that exceed conventional cartographic modes of representation.

You may continue to work with your group, form a new group or pair, or work alone. If you plan to form a new group/pair or work alone, let us know by lab on Thursday, May 12.

Schedule

The project is again divided into three parts, from Thursday 5/19 through the publication deadline on Friday, 6/03: a presentation (5/24), two working sessions (5/19 + 5/26), and the publication of your atlas to Medium.

1. Project presentation (in class, Tuesday, 5/24). See Deliverables for details.
2. Working Sessions (in lab, Thursday, 5/19 and Thursday, 5/26): From 5/19 on, lab will be reserved for working sessions. We will schedule blocks of time for each group (or individual if working alone). For Thursday, 5/19, we will spend time with each group/individual providing focused feedback on your midterm projects. In order to make this session as useful as possible, we will ask you to prepare a media prospectus for your atlas that outlines any additional drawings you plan to make, ideas for revisions to existing work, compositional questions, and technical concerns. You are welcome to highlight specific skills, workflows, techniques, or software you want to develop further or learn that go beyond what we’ve covered in our previous lab sessions; given feasibility, we will direct you to appropriate resources and be able to provide hands-on guidance in lab. Note that your media prospectus will be in addition to the individual parts of the scenographic map you will work on for {L05.2}, which will be the basis for the working session on 5/26 culminating in the final map for your atlas.
3. Medium Publication: You will publish your atlas on Medium (by Friday, 6/03, end of day). See Deliverables for details.

Grading Deadlines

1. Please note that the Medium publishing deadline corresponds with the last final exam window and is not flexible. Under normal circumstances no extensions can be granted due to university-wide grading deadlines.
2. If you are graduating, your final grade needs to be submitted by 5/28. This means you will need to submit all materials for your atlas (whether you are contributing to a group project or are doing an individual project) by 5/27 @ 5pm. Again, this is a hard deadline that is in place so you can graduate without incident, so make sure to get everything to us in a timely fashion.

Guiding Questions / Assessment Rubric

Rather than focus on technical requirements, this project emphases a more open-ended, deliberate, and creative engagement with a combination of resources drawn from our work in critical spatial media and associated theory. The questions below are meant to guide how you compose your media and text into a single, flowing narrative built around your scenographic map, with additional media in support. They also reflect the assessment rubric we’ll use for formally evaluating your project.

While the structure of your atlas is more flexible than the Epochal Constellation, it should still be guided by the core set of critical and creative questions we posed for the {EC}, with the necessary contextual modifications. However, you do not need to answer these questions in order, nor should you respond to them like short-answers on an exam. Use this as a kind of internal check-list, and make sure you’re responding to each prompt in a way that supports your narrative. That means some responses will be part of the compositional choices you make for your drawings or selection of archival media, alluded to with a caption; some may be original text or well-placed quotations/references as part of your written narrative.

5Ws + 1H (who/what/where/when/why/how)

• How do you define your ‘cene?
• Who or what is the “protagonist” of your ‘cene, i.e., who or what is centered by the term and the narrative of planetary transformations it puts forward? Who or what are the antagonists? How are the protagonists and antagonists related to each other? Why do these choices and relations matter for the argument your ‘cene is trying to make?
• Where are the particular places, geographies, and/or more abstract spaces that anchor your ‘cene? How are they connected?
• When does your ‘cene begin, and why does that matter?
• Why and how do these who/what/where/when’s reveal a new perspective on the dominant forces, agents, and dynamics of the Anthropocene?

Theory

• How is your ‘cene informed by a particular theoretical framework or set of frameworks?
• How does that framework critically engage conventional ways of thinking about the Anthropocene, and how does it offer new insights into alternative ways of seeing and reimagining the Anthropocene?
• How does that framework creatively structure your atlas? Does it generate new organizing principles or categories? Does it lead you to “hidden abodes” (Fraser), or help you discover a spatial “logic” (e.g., McKittrick’s “plantation logics”) that explains the relations between otherwise disconnected geographies and histories?

Method

• What disciplinary, evidentiary, and/or narrative methods does your ‘cene draw on?
• How do these methods reveal, reflect, determine, or hide the core elements of the ‘cene, i.e. the who/what/where/when?

Data & Evidence

• How are the data and/or evidence for your ‘cene technically produced, and how are they presented? How does this effect the ways you can choose to represent your ‘cene?
• How does the methodologically, theoretically, and empirically diversity of your data/evidence engage the geographic, historical, scalar, and material complexities of your ‘cene?

Media

• How do different media reflect the diversity of sources you’re using to represent your ‘cene?
• How do those particular and/or diverse media — artifacts, satellite or aerial imagery, maps, drawing styles, projections, data, and so on — help distill different dimensions of your ‘cene? How do they help connect or relate those dimensions?
• Who and what is made visible by these media, and who and what is made invisible? What are the political and social consequences of those media on the agency of different beings, bodies, or entities in your ‘cene?

Deliverables

Presentation: 5/24 in class

On Tuesday, 5/24, you will have 10 minutes to guide us through your ‘cene’s world using media from your atlas, with a primary focus on your scenographic map. Your presentation should be media-based, not text-based, and narrative, rather than merely descriptive or explanatory. Show us what your ‘cene’s world is about by immersing us in it. In other words, use your original and archival/found media to tell a story about the world the atlas maps out. Let the spatial media do the work — no bullet points required (or desired)! As suggested for your EC presentation, you might imagine this as part of a representative “scene” from the world your ‘cene explores. You might also consider a speculative journey between different sites important to your atlas. If you have another creative mode of presentation that supports your narrative, feel free to develop your own approach.

Your original drawings and written narrative do not need to be complete at this point, but the presentation should be thoughtfully composed, well-constructed, and formally delivered (in contrast to the midterm pitch). You may use any number of slides, but we strongly encourage you to keep it below 10 given the short time for presentation so that we can spend more time with each drawing (or selection thereof).

Atlas Publication: 6/03, end of day

Publish your atlas to Medium by June 3, end of the day. Like the {EC}, your atlas must consist of well-integrated text and media integrated into a single narrative. Compose the story as a single piece, flowing from beginning to end. It should be readable by any interested person unfamiliar with the course (but broadly comfortable with academic scholarship, literature, and writing; imagine sharing this with a roommate or friends at UChicago). Choose a creative but descriptive title and subtitle, and subdivide/organize the piece into whatever combination of sections make most sense for your narrative. When you’re ready to publish your piece by assigning it to the class publication, and set the story tag to “Final Project”. Once we (as editors) approve the story (in this case a technical formality, not a review process), it will automatically be assigned to the Atlas section of the course publication.

Please note that while there are no specific technical requirements for your drawings (e.g., how many/what type of datasets to use, raster or vector graphics, etc), we expect you to demonstrate that you have seriously engaged with both the technical workflows and aesthetic/compositional approaches we’ve covered in class. For each original drawing, include a “narrative legend” and sources in an extended caption; for all found/archival media, include a shorter, descriptive caption with full citation and linked source where appropriate.

The atlas will be comprised of the following components:

1. A new, multi-part scenographic map (in the style of the “Detonator” landscapes from Tsing et al’s Feral Atlas). The map will be initially composed in discrete sections based on your group size (i.e., if you’re a group of 3, it will be a triptych), building on the assignment for {L05.2}, an assembled into a final, synthetic map. The map should be composed to present a complex, multi-scalar geography of landscapes or other sites important to your ‘cene and organized to show a temporal dimension, i.e., as a scenographic “visual timeline.” Though the final map should be presented as a single, synthetic drawing, each individual will be responsible for one part of the map. How you divide up the map — e.g., historically, geographically, thematically, or otherwise — is your choice. However, to accommodate graduating students who need to submit their final work a week early, we strongly encourage you to choose a method for dividing up the map that will facilitate stitching together the final product easily. Make sure to include an extended caption, as per the guidelines above, and indicate who is primarily responsible for the different parts of the drawing.
2. Three additional drawings (four if there are four in your group) of different types to support the scenographic map. Any and/or all of these may be revisions of drawings made for your {EC}. Any revised drawings must substantially improve on the original (based in large part on our feedback); however, what constitutes “substantial improvement” may vary significantly, from changing lineweights in Illustrator to changing projections in QGIS or a combination of multiple changes. Make sure to fully cite (and link to, where appropriate) the original datasets you’re using, and list the primary author/artist from your group for each drawing. If it’s a collaborative drawing, make sure to list the name of the person who made the original drawing for the {EC} first.
3. Archival/found media (with linked sources and full citations) that enrich the context of your original drawings and support your overall narrative. You may use media incorporated/collaged into your other drawings, but consider using additional media as well. There is no minimum or maximum number of archival/found media, but given these media are already essential elements for your scenographic maps, we strongly encourage and expect a robust set that work in complement with your original media.
4. A written narrative of at least 1500 words that incorporates quotations and references from scholarly literature and journalistic sources. The way you organize your text depends on your narrative structure, but should not be thought of separately from the media elements.
5. A bibliography/works cited, including all media, textual, and data sources. Use the Chicago Manual of Style citation quick guide for formatting reference. Both Notes & Bibliography and Author-Date styles are fine.