There is a Man Cut in Two by a Window: Oneiric Architecture in the City

This studio will use Aragon’s Paris Peasant as a loose guide for how we will look at the city. Utilizing several AI network types – StyleGANs, sinGANs, style transfer neural networks, etc., and a range of platforms— Google Colab, RunwayML, Artbreeder, Ostagram, etc., we will experiment with the ways in which training, and particularly mis-training artificial intelligence produces a kind of image-rich “knowledge” that appears more like an AI subconscious than our familiar, everyday reality. The images that come from this artificial subconscious are oneiric and strange yet have a photographic precision that allows us to see beyond the limits of our own aesthetic reality with great fidelity. And despite the AI networks being used as tools for us to produce images, they persist in having a kind of intelligent and creative autonomy outside of our control. In this way these AI tools work like Surrealist automatism. Our experiments with this automated and automatic “seeing” seek to engender new architectural forms and expressions.