Thijs Biersteker’s work hinges on collaborations with scientists in order to transform facts into emotions, while avoiding provocation or fear, in order to ensure the audience finds an emotional connection with the issues, to make the situation personal, and to encourage us to act. To do so, he resorts to technology, in particular AI, not for its own sake, but as a medium offering an experiential dimension. By using the same sensors and tools as researchers, his immersive installations highlight such things as intelligence, communication systems, and the systemic inclusion of plants, which act as a metaphor of our relationship with the world.
Soon available in open access.
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Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
Though AI is revolutionizing the practice of architecture, it follows the increasing digitalization that has been unfolding since the 1980s. Kent Larson was one of its pioneers. Alongside the City Science research group at MIT, he explores how data can help imagine production processes and innovative forms of urban governance stemming from an evidence-based approach and favoring consensus-building through modeling. He views this holistic approach to the complexity of urban reality as the only one that could bring about genuine change, though it raises the issue of the quality and control of data. He also calls for community databases offering an alternative to surveillance capitalism.
Since digital technologies have emerged, they have caused an epistemic rupture in the field of architecture. Initially misunderstood and rejected, this revolution now informs a large part of architectural research and has achieved an expressive power as well as operational capability on an unprecedented scale. Art historian Marie-Ange Brayer analyzes the recent evolutions of computational architecture and presents the work of a young generation of architects whose work revolves around temporalities, materials, and the self-organizing systems of living organisms. She explains the concept of “naturalization” in the field of architecture: a form of hybridization that makes it possible to rethink the opposition between nature and artifice. Marie-Ange Brayer is doctor in architecture and art history. From 1996 to 2014, she is the director of the Frac Centre.