Karel Klein

Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has been working with various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies since 2016. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs and their capacity for contemporary myth-making in architecture. In the same way that imaginative vocabulary and metaphoric style were primary, if literary instruments for the invention of new mythologies for the Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using artificial intelligence are similarly a kind of matter metaphor-ed and made visible by the cyborg imagination. With these tools, Karel is interested in the re-enchantment of the architectural body—one that both foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions, and one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational. Her work in this domain has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, 2021, the FRAC Institute, Orleans, France, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis, and SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent essays in pursuit of this work include “Verto Pellis,” in OffRamp, issue 17, “Machines are Braver than Art,” in Paprika/Rendering Fiction, Volume 7, Issue 08, and “Machines À Rechercher,” in Log 55, Summer 2022. A forthcoming essay entitled “To Think a New Thing, AI, Metaphor and the Fantasies of Knowing” is scheduled to be published in 2024. A recent lecture, "Sing, Goddess", was given at University of Texas, Austin in May, 2023. Karel teaches currently at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Washington University, and University of Pennsylvania.