Claire Gorman, Ezra Stiles '20

Tabula Rasa: the omnipresent ghost

By Rashel Chipi.

Claire Gorman’s desire to test her education against theoretical questions landed her in Valdivia, Chile and Hiroshima, Japan for her research. Gorman’s research explores the notion of the “tabula rasa” or blank slate in both computer science and urbanism. The concept of a tabula rasa in computer science refers to a “thinking machine that’s able to learn, starting from nothing,” and in urbanism the tabula rasa refers to “represents an empty [physical] site.”

Her research consists of computer science research and three urban case studies. During her junior year, she was awarded the Harvey Geiger Fellowship for Architecture studies to conduct field work for her thesis. She proposed to visit Hiroshima, Japan, a site which was made a tabula rasa by an atomic bomb in 1945. Gorman also visited Valdivia, Chile, which was “the site of the largest earthquake ever recorded” in 1960. The two sites gave Gorman a chance to explore “the concept of tabula rasa as a man-made erasure [in the case of Hiroshima] and as a natural erasure [in the case of Valdivia].” Her last case study focused on the cultural erasure on land previously inhabited by Indigenous people. 

Her research argues that “there are ways to transfer computational thinking through a landscape. The theory of the computational theory of mind states that intelligence can emerge from many many non-intelligent components working together. The brain, for example, does all these tiny calculations, none of which are intelligent themselves. A landscape in some ways does the same thing.” Her ultimate goal with this research is to enhance the intelligent aspects of landscapes, by supplementing technology such as sensors, that assist the land in becoming more sustainable and “equitable to live in.” 

Gorman interestingly noted that, “the tabula rasa is a theoretical extreme that has already been disproven. And yet, it is a common point from which many projects begin both in computer science and architecture. I think there are “ghosts”, like the tabula rasa, in every discipline that no one believes in, but that are secretly influencing the discipline.” This was an especially important lesson that Gorman learned from her research because she warned several times throughout her project that the tabula rasa was not a concept worth studying.

Gorman majored in Computing and the Arts, which combines computer science and architecture, in her case. The major offers no classes that combine both disciplines, which means students are left to find and explore “the theoretical crossover” of these disciplines on their own. The tabula rasa, a phrase that exists in both fields, gave Gorman an opportunity to do just that. 

Although Gorman has since graduated, she tried many different extracurriculars during her time at Yale. She explored many interests from designing theatre sets to working for the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) and she even joined the Varsity Sailing Team for two weeks. Gorman was an involved leader in the First-year Outdoor Orientation Trips (FOOT) program and eventually spent a summer working for the Guadalupe Mountains National Park Service in Texas. 

Gorman was also the curriculum developer for Code Haven, “a student organization that visits New Haven public elementary schools weekly and teaches computer-programming principles”. Gorman also worked on a project in the Urban Ecology and Design Lab called the “ThermoGreen Wall”, where a vertical wet-land was constructed on the walls of buildings to explore their cooling effect on water. Since graduating, Gorman has joined the MIT Senseable City Lab as a research specialist.