2022

MIDJOURNEY

A "mechanical dove" created with the V5 version of Midjourney's algorithm.

AI AG STARTS

How can architecture build on recent advances in artificial imagination, machine learning, and synthetic intelligence to --productively and speculatively, practically and skeptically, knowingly and enthusiastically-- construct, challenge, alter, and imagine actual and novel architectural realities? Working collaboratively with machines and with one another, students in this Advisory Group pursued varieties of design research into the sub-field of artificial intelligence known as artificial imagination. Ranging from machine vision to novel image generation using neural networks, artificial imagination strives to produce and interpret images in ways that not only mimic the complexities, powers, and applications of human vision and visual cognition, but also activate a synthetic (human/machine) dialogue. Artificial Imagination is as much an adventure in computational potential as research into the capacities of our brains to asssemble visual information and to construct images --in perception or conception-- as matters of processing and calculation. These emerging kinds of human-machine cognition are projective and affirmational but often in ways that refuse, or are opaque to, established and accepted logics and design thinking. Projects in this group creatively question and redefine the identities of architects in ways that re-imagine them as synthetic curators and editors of language, data, prompts, and imaging outputs. Each project aims to develop innovative uses of synthetic intelligence which challenge seemingly (but not actually) moribund issues such as authorship, authenticity, and representation by performing design research as real-time inquiry into the potential of artificial imagination.