AI NEURAL NETS AND MIXED REALITIES IN THE URBAN FABRIC
Type: Design Research
Location: Downtown Los Angeles, USA
Duration: May - August 2019
Description:
Existing in tension between the physical and the non-physical, the project re-examines the hyper-dense urban block by juxtaposing it against a digital veneer. Possible relationships and interactions between digital and physical are interrogated through a speculative urban tectonic that is it simultaneously physical and digital.
The result is a highly articulated, trackable architecture for machine vision overlayed with a digital filter that changes our notions of what it means to inhabit and traverse a space. The project interrogates these digital/physical interactions at a variety of scales - from the scale of the urban block, to the scale of the human body - through the development of augmented and mixed reality architectural environments. Constructed through various sampling techniques of content based image retrieval, in this case pixel averaging and convolutional neural net style transfer, these environments are estranged, bastardized versions of historic architectural typologies. It is a speculative hyperbole that embraces a constructed synthetic reality that is at once familiar and at once uncanny.
In aggregate, these hybrid digital/physical environments create landscapes that enable data to begin to take on qualities that are phenomenological rather than informative. It is an architecture of spectacle activated through the collective occupation of its inhabitants.
