https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/318513-staging-encounters-with-landscape-matter
Over the past decade, Aroussiak Gabrielian has developed a series of speculative design prototypes that interrogate the position of the human within an increasingly unstable planetary future. Working at the intersection of landscape architecture, media arts, and futures practice, her projects stage intimate encounters between human bodies and landscape matter – soil, plants, water, atmosphere – to unsettle extractive habits of perception and cultivate new modes of attention, reciprocity, and care.
Drawing inspiration from fragmentary traces of indigenous Armenian cosmologies that understood the natural world as a living field of relations – where mountains, springs, trees, winds, and soil were animated presences within a shared ecological and spiritual order – Gabrielian explores how design can function not only as a tool for shaping environments but as a medium for transforming relationships between human and more-than-human worlds through installations, rituals, and experimental spatial practices.
This lecture presents recent creative works, writings, and applied research, examining how speculative design and expanded media can reorient environmental imaginaries and open pathways toward more ethical and collaborative ways of living within planetary systems in flux.
Bio:
Aroussiak Gabrielian, Ph.D is a designer, scholar, media artist, and professional futurist whose work examines the evolving entanglements between environment, technology, and culture. As Founding Design Principal and Futures Consultant at FOREGROUND DESIGN AGENCY, she leads transdisciplinary design-research and foresight initiatives that rethink humanity’s relationship to planetary systems and prototype regenerative strategies for living – and dying – on a planet in flux.
Trained as an Architect, Landscape Architect, and Artist, Aroussiak holds dual master’s degrees (M.Arch + M.L.Arch, with honors) from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California, where she was an Annenberg Fellow. Her practice integrates speculative design, futures methodologies, and expanded media to engage the spatial, temporal, sensorial, and material dimensions of landscape – developing frameworks for social and ecological transformation.
Before founding FOREGROUND, Aroussiak was a Lead Designer at Snøhetta in New York City, contributing to major projects including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion and the Guadalajara Museum of Environmental Science. She continues to consult as a futures practitioner and domain expert, with recent collaborations including Nike, Ford Motor Company, Google Research, and the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.
Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award, and the Emerging Designer Award from the Design Futures Initiative. Her projects and installations have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Getty Center, SXSW (South by Southwest), Ars Electronica, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, the Eli & Edith Broad Museum Art Lab, A+D Museum Los Angeles, the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York City, and Science Gallery Detroit.
Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, Affiliate Faculty in Media Arts + Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts, and Founding Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, a design-research incubator advancing climate innovation and imagination.