Synthetic Imagination
Artificial Intelligence as a phenomenon has sparked several questions regarding ethics, privacy, morality, and how our future will look with its increasing influence in our society. Authors such as Kate Crawford have researched and theorized “Artificial Intelligence” as a generative, information processing tool that has evolved from previous technologies. Their limitations and capabilities combined have the potential to fuel imagination and creativity in collaborative workspaces. Synthetic imagination is the implementation of artificial intelligence systems in collaborative design processes to revisualize methods of exploring qualities and complexities of environments, their objects, and their interactions.
Audio Artifacts is an exploration of the perceptual, sensorial entanglements between haptics, sound, and visuals that occur when we start to think and collaborate multi-modally with AI. By forefronting sound in the design process to speculate on how one can reimagine space, we challenge the traditional reliance on visuals that have dominated our relationships with the world.
Bridging Realities investigates AI’s capability to generate and reimagine the potential of what data-embedded surfaces could mean for the physical world. An aesthetic emerges that synthetically encompasses both human and machine vision, bridging the gap between physical and digital landscapes — creating a bridged reality. The role of scannable surfaces in shaping and informing interaction in our cities will fundamentally change the way we design, inhabit, and understand the environment.
The Time Is Smear approaches AI as a means of merging and exploring the temporal qualities of spaces by allowing them to be expressed and collapsed into a representation of potential designs. The smears are generated through inputting temporal material collected from a subjective spatial experience and allowing the system to dream up potentials of that experience, the projected installation allowed their features to be imagined in real-time.
Through three separate approaches, these processes have explored how AI has fundamentally transformed the way we understand the world around us. We reimagine as architects how collaborative engagement with AI can allow us to synthetically imagine new design processes.
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Contrary to beliefs that AI is alien, technological tools that have been built through AI models have been used by humans for years–Autocorrect, Photoshop, etc. The common public misperception, known as the AI effect, is that as soon as these AI technologies successfully solve a problem, that solution method is no longer within the domain of being considered “AI”. It is only a model that exists because of the large amount of computational and informational data that is fed into an infrastructure model. Imagining, experimenting, and exploring AI technologies with various capabilities and constraints, while harnessing human and machine capabilities, expands on exploring new design processes within the discipline. To creatively engage with synthetic methodologies of design processes, combining our understanding of “form” and “meaning”, our DR explores a multimodal engagement beyond the traditional stagnant engagement people have used in AI (such as images and text). By doing so, we can speculatively uncover new object networks, connections, and translations in a way that our current, human perceptual models do not allow.