-
THE PROJECT
June 2023 to May 2024 was a crucial year in the emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence and its assimilation by a broad audience. This archive collects and curates articles in the popular and specialized media that document public response to and understanding of generative AI during those twelve months. It is intended as a resource for anyone interested how generative AI was explained, promoted, and applied during that early phase of its emergence, how that public discourse evolved over that time, and how the early emergence of generative AI can serve as a case study of disruptive technological change.
The archive was collected in real time (and continues to be expanded retrospectively) by a team of researchers with a focus on the ways generative imaging challenges established norms and practices of design and visual culture. The aim is to comprehensively identify and document trends, responses, uses, speculation, and explanations of the impact of generative AI. It will serve as a resource to understand how attitudes toward, understanding of, and engagement with a novel and controversial technology rapidly formed, shifted, and evolved in both surprising and typical ways.
This website allows visitors to access and sort the full database of articles using keywords and date ranges. It is also a tool to visualize the changing topics of discussion. We hope this resource will be used by experts and well as those who are casually curious to enhance our collective awareness of the fickle, anxious, enthused, and often misguided character of the public reception of AI.
This archive is a component of the Synthetic Imagination (SI) transdisciplinary research collaborative led by Mark Linder and Emily Pellicano. Its work focuses on potential uses and impacts of artificial intelligence in architectural design. Our aim is to consider the potential of generative AI models to redefine the identities of the architects and their procedures of design as intensively collaborative and radically synthetic (human/machine). We pursue design research into emerging technologies, applications, and aesthetics of architectural imagination and production with a focus on the potential of synthetic imagination to generate new architectural practices and products, and to devise new media to engage architectural audiences who inhabit present and future SI ecosystems.
From machine vision to novel image generation using neural networks, SI is as much an adventure in computational potential as research into the latent and potential capacities of our brains to process information and to assemble operative images. We engage generative AI technologies as prosthetic brains and real-time collaborators. SI design operates as a biological and technological neural feedback loop between human imaging capacities and the imaging potential of machine processing and calculation.
How can SI enable architects to productively and speculatively, practically and skeptically, knowingly and enthusiastically construct, challenge, alter, and imagine actual and novel realities?
THE PEOPLE
Mark Linder is a professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture. His research explores design theory and history since 1950 considered in a transdisciplinary framework. His modus operandi is speculative contrarian progressive, with a deep commitment to the robust potential of architecture as an intellectual enterprise that actually matters in ways that are endemic, obvious, wonderful, subtle, powerful, and inescapable, but hardly understood and rarely activated by architects.
Emily Pellicano is an assistant professor at Ithaca College. She is a perpetually discontent utopian who is happiest at the thresholds between disciplines, convinced that there is always an/other way to engage, image, represent, or model the world around us, in order to affect changes in cognition, consciousness and construction. Emily’s work attempts to diversify the authorship of imagination, to loosen the grip, to shift perceptions and open the doors for alternative realities.
Casey Kelley, Web Designer and Student Researcher, Syracuse University School of Architecture
Ashley Kao, Student Researcher, Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences
Runfeng Franklin Wang, Student Researcher, Syracuse University School of Information Studies