Plants die. But how often do we see dead plants in digital landscape representation? In the corners of renders and animations, vegetation from digital asset libraries–collections built into tools like V-Ray, Enscape, or Lumion–is typically rendered in a lush climax state. These 3D models operate as an aesthetic shorthand for lush, green, and idealized nature, sanitizing digital landscapes that are modeling futures shaped by collapse and scarcity. What is often missing, however, is the visual language of disturbance that is made legible through the remains of plants and the plants that remain. These absences raise a critical question: what does it mean to design or depict a landscape without death, and what stories are lost when we do? Death in the landscape is not incidental; it is informational. Dead and dying plants index a wide range of causes for landscape change–drought, disease, pollution, invasive species, shifting climates, extraction, or neglect–each embedded in specific sociopolitical and ecological histories. Within scientific collections like herbaria and arboreta, plant remains are collected, catalogued, and preserved for their evidentiary value–though these material archives are also faced with their own forms of loss and disturbance. Botanical collections, living and dead, understand plant remains not as disappearance, but as data that traces of the past and indicates the future.

In this course, we will disturb the digital plant collection. By developing landscape assets that depict mortality and decomposition, we will respond to the technical and conceptual gaps in visualization software that flatten ecological relationships with time, history, and disturbance. By including the remains and plants that remain in our screens–the burnt tree, the felled forest, the withered crop–we will aim to demonstrate complexity, context, and consequence into plant representation by considering their physiological responses to stressors. Using open source 3D scanning and animation software, students will develop representations of plants based on herbarium reference material and live plant specimen to create drawings, 2D and 3D animations. Focusing on plants sited in the northeast, these representations will describe how plants change over the course of their lifecycles and how they respond physiologically to environmental change and stressors, culminating into a final project in a digital medium of the students’ choosing. Course material will be supported by reading on environmental history and theories, lectures, and field trips to local collections, living and dead.

Students are encouraged to experiment: no prior experience with digital animation software is required, just a curiosity and interest in learning more.