Neural Pathologies

This studio has previously positioned AI as a partner, or collaborator, to the human decision maker, in order to challenge both the methods and the status of the artist/designer, and thereby obfuscating the notion that AI might be merely understood and deployed as a new kind of tool. This allows students to collaborate with and employ the AI networks in order to develop different kinds of agencies for radical new material and tectonic forms and expressions in architecture. This semester in addition to aligning oneself with AI as a collaborator, we consider and deploy AI as (image) genes or progeny – or more curiously, as pathogens. Pathogens, defined as specific causative agents of disease, can also be understood as disruptions or disordering of normative systems. In George Canguilhem’s text, “The Normal and the Pathological,” what is termed “normal” is called into question. Health, he writes, is actually defined through the observation and identification of disease, and he further argues against equating health with normality. Normal, then, is not only necessarily determined through the lens of pathology but is also constantly re-defined and re-made as a result of the disruptive presence of pathogens. Introducing foreign parts and features, through AI neural networks, to our architectural project – our site and program, for instance, obliges us to discover and define new architectural expressions. In other words, new normals.