Architectural Bestia Addresses Mutation and Machine Learning in New Exhibition

SCI-Arc is proud to announce a new exhibition, entitled Architectural Bestia, which will open virtually on April 2 and run through August 31, 2021, with an accompanying symposium held on April 3 from 6:00pm to 9:30pm.

Curated by SCI-Arc Director Hernán Díaz Alonso and designed by Architectural Technologies Coordinator M. Casey Rehm, Architectural Bestia will feature work by Atelier Manferdini, BairBalliet, Baumgartner+ Uriu Architects, Current Interests, Aminatou Fall, Florencia Pita & Co., Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Griffin Enright Architects, Soomeen Hahm Design, HDA-X, Kordae Henry, Kinch, Lifeforms.io, P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Ruy Klein, servo LA-Stockholm, SU11 Architecture + Design, Testa & Weiser, Tom Wiscombe Architecture, William Virgil, and Liam Young.

Through artificial intelligence, the work presented in the virtual exhibition will be exposed to a perpetual state of transformation and mutation, gathering a key set of practices, primarily from architecture, but also from art and fashion, “to reveal facets of the strange beast that the tumultuous paradigm shifts of recent decades have left behind.” In other words: “The notion of authorship itself is in flux.”

“In every process of evolution, there is a period of extreme contamination that lends the possibility for the trajectories of species to begin to mutate,” continues the exhibition text for Bestia. The exhibition further illustrates that in the last thirty years, design has experienced multiple paradigm shifts generated by an eruption of new methodologies, derived both from new technologies, as well as a series of cultural changes, “each prompting a reorganization in the culture of design, architecture, and art, and violating an old order, rendering it historical, obsolete.”

“The Architectural Bestia is an autonomous aesthetic explorer,” comments Rehm. “Each night the machine scours the internet for the previous day’s most popular architectural imagery, incorporating this new content into the existing dataset. Every day the machine then generates a partial map of its learned image space, centering the grid around the previous day's most clicked image. This daily labor generates an evolving archive of works which shift aesthetics from those valued by the academy to those valued through collective engagement on social media.”

Architectural Bestia is generously supported by Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

More information on the exhibition as well as live viewing links for the opening and symposium can be found on the SCI-Arc event page.