What Is It?

The Experimental Geography Studio is an entity I founded in 2016.  It is a crystallization of, and catalyst for, the deepest enduring currents of my professional life as a designer, artist, and geographer. The studio operates as both a solo workspace and as a gathering place for collaborations among artists and scholars interested in the intersection of art and geography.

Contact

Studio director: Nicholas Bauch

Email: nbbauch@gmail.com

Vision

The Experimental Geography Studio fosters the meeting of human geography with the visual arts. I experiment with various mediums to answer how to best communicate with users such that 1) the form carries the message, and 2) the medium carries out (i.e. does) the research. Through building new forms, insights about the subject matter emerge.  The Studio values risk-taking and novel approaches to unraveling design problems of all kinds.

Short Bio

Nicholas Bauch is Cartographic Experience Designer in the Creative Lab at Esri, a world leader in GIS technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography (2010) from the University of California-Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts (2021) from the University of Minnesota. He is author of Enchanting the Desert (2016, Stanford University Press), and A Geography of Digestion (2017, University of California Press).  Prior to pursuing an M.F.A. degree, he was founding faculty director of the Experimental Geography Studio at the University of Oklahoma, the Studio’s first home.  He has taught geography, photography, history, and language at six universities since 2004. Between 2012 and 2016, he was a scholar at CESTA, Stanford University’s digital humanities research center.

GeoHumanities Lecture at Carleton College

Below is a lecture (in 2 videos) that I gave to the Carleton College Digital Humanities Center in 2017. Though a bit dated now, I think it captures succinctly my rationale for the creation of the Experimental Geography Studio, and how, more broadly, I was thinking of the GeoHumanities at that time. This is before I knew I would be earning an M.F.A. degree at the University of Minnesota, and it’s interesting to see some of the earlier seeds of that formal outgrowth.