JOERILEY.WORK




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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.


VIS 133A Studio Topics in Speculative Design: Oceanic Futures Spring 2023
UC San Diego

The field of speculative design emphasizes critical practices and interventions that are based on fabulation and exploration of alternative futures and realities. In this course, we will follow this trajectory into the sea, where “the field” and its 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 regional watersheds, 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 numerous site visits and field trips, both on and off 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 midterm project development presentation, students will create an original ocean design/visual arts research project, consisting of both written and visual elements. This course has prerequisites; however, exceptions may be made for students who wish to enroll and are already engaged in environmental science majors, environmental humanities, marine engineering, archaeology, anthropology, and related fields. 



Learning objectives and outcomes:

  • Conduct visual arts-based research and critical fabulation in the context of marine scientific laboratories, archives, and non-terrestrial and fluid environments.
  • Identify and evaluate connections between ocean environmental phenomena and key methods and concerns of speculative design as a field, including, but not limited to, digital technology and memory, geopolitics/geopoetics, climate futures, and community-based practice.
  • Demonstrate knowledge of, and a critical perspective on, an ongoing “oceanic turn” in the fields of visual art and design 
  • Prototype and iterate artworks and design objects that embody complex systems and material realities, such as those intrinsic to marine life, maritime technologies, and oceanic phenomena


Student work samples:

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