JOERILEY.WORK





joriley@ucsd.edu
@pleasedontfront
linktr.ee/joeriley
mailing list

Photo: Natalie Conn

 Joe Riley is an artist, historian, and Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego Visual Arts in a joint environmental research program with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. 

  Joe’s research has recently been supported by the Getty Scholars Program, a UCSD Rita L. Atkinson Fellowship, and the UC Humanities Research Institute. His dissertation, Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward A Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970, foregrounds and critically examines histories and practices of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine life situated within California’s university-military-research complex.

  From 2020–2025 Joe has been a participating artist and co-curator for the Pacific Standard Time exhibition Embodied Pacific, featuring projects by thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in Southern California and the Pacific Islands. 

  Previously, he was an Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Joe holds a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art and has taught at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos, Stevens Institute of Technology, and The Cooper Union.
TEACHING







VIS 101A: Designing Urban EcologiesWinter 2025
UC San Diego

VIS 101A offers a design studio-lab setting to introduce students to actual hands-on visual processes to design urban ecological interventions. Through individual and group work in our “co-laboratory,” situated in the DIB Makerspace, we will use hands-on practices of prototyping and design fabrication to experiment with the urban and ecological as conceptual design frameworks. 

We will begin the quarter with brief introductions to the conceptual boundaries of the “wildland urban interface” (WUI). Through a series of guest lecturers and field-site visits we will explore shifting and slippery meanings of the “urban,” and of “ecology,” and the different design methods and approaches to constructing urban-ecological design platforms. Our exploration will be anchored by methods of doing “field work” and “lab work” as designers. Utilizing design and prototyping techniques honed during skill-building workshops, we will tackle design problems associated with WUI, with the aim of building collaborative relationships not only with each other, but also class partners like UCSD’s Cleland Lab, the EarthLab Community Station, and the Condor Media





The main task for the quarter will be to design and build a “field station,” or a platform/toolset for study, data-gathering, teaching, dreaming, and staging intervention(s) at a local site. Toward this goal, our class will divide in 3-4 interrelated “co-laboratory” working groups each dedicated to a specific topic/intervention. Design research trajectory options for each co-laboratory include:

Water + Soil (Co-laboratory 1)

Primary partner/site: EarthLab Community Station

Wildfire Recovery + Resilience (Co-laboratory 2 + 3)

Partners/sites:  Cleland Lab (Karagan Smith and Alexander Gillert), Condor Media (Andrew Pittman)

Wildflowers + Wildlife (Co-laboratory 4)

Partners/sites: Cleland Lab (Julia Bebout), UCSD Urban Forestry (Chris Johnson)

Studio and site visits:


Student work samples:

Liana Kitchel, Caleb Holmes, Anna Norris
Sarah Chung, Sydney Nunnemaker, Jiaxin Tao
Susana Lazaro Hernandez, Alan Gonzalez, Aditya Venkatesh 
Gurleen Kurr, Jacie Littell, Dayton Garrett
Erin Kee, David Ledesma, William Ung
Ajjon Zimmerman, Juliana Amaya, Christine Bui




  




AMD 316: Art, Science, & TechnologySpring 2023 - Spring 2024
Cal State San Marcos

AMD 316 is centered on the juncture of art and science in contemporary art practice. Throughout the semester, we will explore the research agendas of various areas of science, art, and design. We will examine key issues and histories of visual representation across science and art, and encounter critical discussions about the power of images, creative interventions, and critical practice in the context of those domains. We will investigate different approaches, materials, and technologies used by artists today, focusing especially on research trajectories in contemporary art and design that interact with environmental and ecological concerns. Projects for the course will be developed based on themes including environmental art and science, physical phenomena (like space, time, light, etc.), research-based art practice, and multispecies relations. 

This course will be a combination of lectures, demonstrations, hands on experimentation, field trips, site visits, and dialogues with practicing artists. Generally, we will begin each class with a lecture on the day’s topics and/or hold class discussion and critiques. The second half of the class will be hands on studio time where students will engage in projects designed around the course material. There will be field trips that will require us to meet off campus on occasion. Students will be informed when they are required to meet off campus.



A central task of this course is to take excellent notes on lectures, presentations, screenings, lab activities, and anything else that takes place in class. Both written and visual notes should be recorded in your Field Notebook, which I will check periodically via Canvas. Evaluation of the Field Notebook is based on the thoroughness of your note-taking and creative visualization of the connections you draw from the information. Labs and hands-on workshops are also central to this class, as are required field trips which will take place both on and off campus. Through these opportunities to observe and conduct fieldwork, we will come to use and understand research (particularly science research) as an artistic strategy and methodology. For your final project, you will conduct original artistic research.

Learning for the course include:

  • Describe historical intersections, divergences, and exchanges of art, science and technology. 
  • Define and use appropriate terminology for hybrid art and science practices.
  • Identify and evaluate recent practices/methods of collaboration between artists and scientists including ecological and multispecies practices. 
  • Critique, compare, and contrast various artists, artworks, and strategies associated with the interface of art and science
  • Practice individual and collaborative research to develop ideas for visual projects in the intersection of art and science
  • Demonstrate skill in basic visual principles, materials and tools in the creation of artistic designs, projects, and prototypes. 
  • Demonstrate knowledge of the history, key figures, politics, strategies, and research agendas of art & science



Student work samples:

Lauren Vega
Anitza Juarez Reyonoso
Alan Lopez 
Crystal Rivera Camarillo
Jordan Lanter
Peter Whitley
Megan Honeck
Tyler Cook
Peter Whitley
Jack McCabe
Peter Whitley
Jacob Wilhelm
Crystal Rivera Camarillo
Reggy Ishaq
Carlos Esquivel
Cia Soto
Peter Whitley
Edson Arcos




  




VIS 133A Specualtive Design Studio: Oceanic Futures Spring 2023
UC San Diego

The field of speculative design emphasizes critical practices and interventions that are based in fabulation and exploration of alternate futures and realities. In VIS 133A (Sp 23), we will follow this trajectory into the sea, where “the field” and associated methods are unmoored from terrestrial realities and challenged by liquid phenomena. Students in the course will engage with the ongoing turn of contemporary art and design toward the ocean, and question how these trends relate to the spectre of anthropogenic climate change. Against a backdrop of rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, loss of marine biodiversity, ocean acidification, etc., what insights and impacts can speculative design offer in (re)imagining the perils and promises of oceanic futures? 

"Topic" comes from the Greek topos, meaning place. We tend to think of "place" as a fixed location, typically on land. This speculative design "special topics" course focuses on design relating to a "place" that is unfixed and fluid: the Earth's ocean. We will consider the ocean and other fluid environmental systems in ways that complicate the association of place with land, property, and fixed locations. We will explore the place(s) of critical and speculative design in fluid environments, focusing specifically on ocean systems and maritime social practices. The course will move away from traditional boundaries of studio and classroom and into San Diego’s coastal ecosystems, deep sea environments, labs where marine life is scrutinized, studied, and even designed, oceanographic archives, and centers and edges of traditional and Indigenous maritime craft.

Participation in this course will involve several site visits and field trips, both on and off main campus. The instructor anticipates that a significant number of weekly meetings will take place away from the assigned classroom space. In addition to completing weekly readings and a mid-quarter project development presentation, students will create an original ocean design research project, consisting of both written and visual elements. VIS 133A has prerequisites (VIS 30 and/or VIS 41), however exceptions may be made for students who wish to enroll and are already engaged in marine and environmental science majors, environmental humanities, marine engineering, archaeology, anthropology, and related fields. 



Learning Objectives and Outcomes:

Develop critical design research practice, vocabulary, and skillset.

Conduct critical design research in the context of laboratories, archives, and non-terrestrial and fluid environments.

Identify and evaluate connections between speculative design and oceanographic research. 

Demonstrate knowledge of an ongoing “oceanic turn” in the fields of visual art and design


Student work samples:

He Xuanru, Catherine Tang
Yuto Ayabe
He Xuanru, Catherine Tang
Evelyn Chen
Stephen De La Pena 




  




HAR 111 Foundation of 3D: Form and Space
Fall 2018 - Spring 2019
Stevens Insitute of Technology

An intensive studio course with an emphasis on traditional and non-traditional three-dimensional studio and design tools, techniques and media. Students work on projects that explore the fundamentals of forms and space and investigate the properties of materials, structure, mass, scale, body, light, and motion. The course explores fundamental principles of designing for three dimensional space, introductory woodworking techniques, casting and mold-making, and physical and digital 3D modelling. Emphasis is placed on problem solving through design, criticism, and studio practice.

Course Objectives:

Continue learning the fundamentals involved in conceiving and creating 3-D works of art and design

Encourage research and awareness of various historical and contemporary 3-D artists and designers and their works

Instruct in the professional and safe use of hand and power tools

Develop analytical skills through critiques


Student work samples:





  




FA100 Introduction to Techniques
Fall 2014 - Spring 2019
Cooper Union 
At Cooper Union I taught Introduction to Techniques, a hands-on course for students of art and architecture to learn metalworking, woodworking, casting, and digital design tools and fabrication methods. 



  




They Can’t Kill Us All
(co-taught with Victoria Sobel & Casey Gollan)
Fall 2013
Bruce High Quality Foundation University
This isn't so much your garden-variety, free, experimental, continuing-ed, art class as it is a weed-patch in a vacant lot. Before us, we have this tangled, suffocating mess that is higher education today.  We'd like to begin clearing it out, burning it down, or whatever else works. They Can't Kill Us All is an effort to do just that. We'd like to take out little patch of weeds that has somehow managed to avoid the lethal blight, of tuition, student debt, standardized testing and indoor rock-climbing walls, and we'd like to cultivate something that's both free and nourishing — in an educational sense.  Food for thought, and thoughts for regurgitating up on anyone, or anything, that tries to kill free education.



Each Wednesday evening for the fall semester at BHQFU, we'll hold an open meeting and a roundtable discussion on free education, to be followed by whatever, or wherever, that may lead us. We'll have guest speakers, partners in crime, and all manner of the educationally-minded join us for these sessions. These meetings will be both a call to action and a space to produce knowledge (not legumes) for the advancement of the struggle for free education. The results could be anything and everything, including, but not limited to: forging educational credentials; researching and writing a free education wiki; working in public; modeling a radically transparent organization; connecting different groups; mapping resources; and organizing lectures, workshops, trainings, and skillshares. 

Meanwhile, you can check out the Meeting Notes document and for more date-based planning as well as a mapping of people we'd like to work with check out the Lecture Series document. This Hackpad site (specifically this page and the BHQFU collection) will serve as an evolving outline. Having come up with a bunch of ideas, we decided to intentionally leave the structure open but punctuated by regular meetings. Things could either get more or less organized throughout the semester. Either way, we hope it does. 










  


GRADUATE TEACHING & RESEARCH ASSISTANT RECORD


2024Graduate Teaching Assistant, VIS 20, Introduction to Art in Europe & America, Fall Quarter
2022Graduate Teaching Assistant, VIS 30 Introduction to Speculative Design, UCSD Visual Arts, Fall Quarter

Graduate Student Researcher for Dr. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA English, Winter Quarter 

2021Graduate Student Researcher for Dr. Lisa Cartwright, Graphic Ocean: Navigating Pacific Science and Design, Spring Quarter

Graduate Student Researcher for Dr. Lisa Cartwright, Graphic Ocean: Navigating Pacific Science and Design, Winter Quarter

Graduate Teaching Assistant, VIS 20, Introduction to Art in Europe & America, Fall Quarter 

2020Graduate Student Researcher, Dr. Jeff Bowman Lab, Scripps Institution of Oceanography 

Graduate Teaching Assistant, VIS 102, Democratizing the City, Spring Quarter

2019Graduate Teaching Assitant, Muir College Writing Program, Fall Quarter