Document Type
Article
Degree
B. ARCH
Date
Fall 12-2021
Keywords
Nature, Synthetic, Plants, Species Matter, Populations, Tangibility, Surrealism, Wilderness, Hybrid. Artificial
Language
English
Disciplines
Architecture
Description/Abstract
The abstract, authorless fabrication of an AI image juxtaposed with the legible photography of the constructed recognition perspective connects the awe-inspiring concept of the “natural” disaster with the tangible reality of its actual and potential destruction, found at culturally known physicalities. It is part of architecture’s responsibility to utilize its agency in demystifying the climate crisis, utilizing potent imagery to manifest the danger and effects of these disasters in a contributing effort to protect America’s cultural icons. Representation therefore holds power in communicating immediacy and emotional investment to the climate crisis. The cultural l legibility of national parks is well represented by two of its best known sites in the Redwood National Forest and Yellowstone National Park, landmarked by their Redwood trees and Old Faithful, Bison, and Wild Landscape. The process of image fabrication is phase-oriented, first identifying a repetitious perspective or photographic focus in social media, as a modern catalogue through hashtagged or Location-marked recorded experiences. This is termed as Constructive Recognition, which MacCannell refers to as “the tourist’s tendency to photograph iconic buildings in the same way as they’ve seen these buildings photographed in published works and ephemera”. Supported w with its ephemeral postcard, the Redwood experience emphasizes verticality, angling, and human to tree scale comparisons as methods of comprehending the spatial and temporal scales of the forest. The Yellowstone experience prioritizes a curated experience of a First Nature “wilderness”, boardwalked into nodes of tourism and photography around hot springs, waterfalls, and bison, for example. Phase Two of Formal Logics utilizes a primary photograph of each site, sourced from the official National Park website, for perspectival direction, and NPS official postcards for grounding and orienting compositional logics for the Image Response. In utilizing artificial imagery and collages as a primary working techniques, I focus on questions of authorship in representation, especially that the three chosen AI networks construct imagery from a network of image and information databases. The Artificial Image Collage Responses are therefore responses to AI as a technology and artistic tool, to reintroduce authorship into AI image with multiple sources and layerings, bringing the collective to the individual author and vice versa. This is important and relevant in the discussion of disasters and climate change, by using representation to illuminate and encourage citizens to engage with global issues, in order to find power in a collective as a response to crisis. Authorship is re-introduced by curating my input phrase selection to prioritize Text with specific connotations, selecting and interpreting AI outputs by subjective definitions of “success” around legibility of iterative process and abstraction of nouns, and collaging AI outputs with intentions of communicating the primary experiences of each park. Image Collage Responses utilize a process of shifting authorship between myself and AI, to introduce abstraction to legibility, the fake and the real, and the potent and the recognizability. In this way, the work from this semester serves to move into conversations around these pairings and methodological overlaps between physical, traditional representations of the actual and the recreated with digital tools and artificial fabrications. To add to these pairings, physicality invites and introduces tangible engagement to these responses. Moving into next semester, I will continue to question and focus on: How do I respond to AI as an arts practice? How does physical representation and collage extend my working method and process? Overall, I envision that my Output in May is an exhibition of Representation responses, their processes, and the discourse to which they contribute.
Recommended Citation
Patrick, Riley, "Picture Perfect: Ephemera, Icons, and Disaster" (2021). Architecture Thesis Prep. 427.
https://surface.syr.edu/architecture_tpreps/427
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
