Research considerations cover several interconnected themes over time.

Architecture and Urban Design
This looks specifically at how the planning of natural and urban environments and their design values can effect social movement, interaction, and the intricate complexities of our experiences of and relationships to our surroundings. Examples look at highway-side architecture and the iconography and syntax of road travel, or the politics of contemporary society’s increasing proliferation of ‘non-places’. These non-places can be viewed as ambiguous, but productive and critical, gaps within contemporary society, and as a deliberate contrast to the pervasive accessibility of a growing digitized society. Within this theme, these architectural structures are compared with the materiality of the digital world; examining code as language and equating this to ‘real’-space, suggesting an analogy where space can be read both as text and passage.

Technology and the Contemporary Landscape
Here the research considers the sense of space created by our emerging digital culture: the cross-sections of car culture, the aesthetics of new power systems, and the infrastructure that underwrites our current technologies. The artworks that fall out of this research contemplate the often contradictory understanding we have of contemporary landscape, when it is shadowed or paired with technology, and virtual tools that are designed to aid our experience and navigation of our physical world. For instance, the mind and physical balance that occurs from the transformed global perspective that satellite maps give to our occupation of the space the under our feet. Such an examination uncovers a vast system of infrastructure, miles of cabling and data centres, often placed in remote desert locations.  

Our contemporary landscape is now made up of infinite layers of ‘nature’, and this is a concept that I refer to as ‘nth nature’, a point that comes after farmed fields, to Google StreetView, on to a potentially infinite number of layers of what we might consider nature. ‘Nth nature’ is an expanded definition of landscape and nature, which takes into consideration our current ways of mapping, imaging and transforming our surroundings. It refers to the influence of power and politics on the alteration of landscape’s material and surface, how distant infrastructures including mines, wind, solar and data farms find their way into the mundane objects and interactions of our urbanised lives.

The core feature of this research is of finding new shapes in looking; here, this extends to how the digital and physical collide, when, after all, they both rely on a hidden infrastructure in remote locations. More specific details on the outcome of these themes in artwork can be found at: www.lilahfowler.com