The exhibition Everything Is Already an Image is a collaboration between Fieldstation Studio, run by Michiel Helbig and Corneel Cannaerts, and Kasper Jordaens, with the support of Artroom. This semester Fieldstation Studio critically investigates the status of contemporary image production in architectural design, triggered by the recent increase in fidelity and accessibility of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools aimed at artists, designers and architects. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the essay Everything is Already an Image, in which John May argues that although we still use terms like drawings and photographs, all architectural media have effectively become images. The computational nature of images allows them to be processed, calculated filtered, tagged and manipulated, they can be endlessly duplicated and transmitted and are inherently dynamic and transformable. This shift in architecture from drawing to image, does not just affect the speed of design processes, but fundamentally impacts how architecture is represented, conceived and understood.
As part of the studio we organized a workshop using Midjourney to replicate architectural media ranging from sketches, drawings, over plans and sections, to renders and simulations. Collectively we produced hundreds of images during the one-day workshop and these images and their textual descriptions where collected using a discord bot. The data-set was filtered, clustered and refined through several algorithms and a selection of 1001 images and their prompts will be printed, sorted and exhibited. Kasper Jordaens, from Polymath Lab LUCA was invited to react to this dataset of images and related text prompts. The resulting data-visualization uses similar technologies to look for hidden connections in the data, further questioning the authorship of the resulting images.
- 14.12.2022 at 18:00 till 23.12.2022
- Pandgang Noord @ Faculty of Architecture, Sint-Lucas Ghent Campus, Hoogstraat 51 – 9000 Gent
Michiel Helbig, Corneel Cannaerts & Annelies De Smet.