PLAYING MODELS 2023

Artificial Intelligence, Architecture and Story Telling

Organized by Karla Saldana Ochoa, Adil Bokhari, Lee-Su Huang and Nikola Marincic

PLAYING MODELS aims to address the fundamental conceptual and technological shifts that AI and computational storytelling instruments (AR/VR) have introduced to design and engineering disciplines and how they are transforming millennia-old traditions of architecture and design thinking. The conference questions Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus-Modernist design pedagogies and post-industrialization design approaches aspiring to efficiency and optimization. It entertains the idea that given an adequate theoretical framing, AI and computational storytelling instruments (AR/VR) offer a novel, less constricting interpretation of today's technological reality, fundamentally different from big tech's efficiency and automation narratives. They allow us to navigate through and communicate with the abundance of otherwise disconnected or inaccessible information in a vivid, playful manner. Such a new digital "metaverse" thus becomes a fruitful source of new hypotheses, findings, and designs as well as a ground for engaging broader audiences as participants in the design and planning processes. During the workshop, we strive to explore, discuss and develop such concepts in the form of texts, images, videos, and 3d models. Over four years, we will compile the conferences' outputs into a book publication, providing a valuable reader on how to rethink our novel technological condition.

Dates:

November 2nd and 3rd 2023

Place:

The in-person event will be held at the John and Anne Sofarelli Family Gallery—School of Architecture (registration warrants entry)

To Join online, please register, and you will receive a link to join online.

The conference attendance is free of charge but requires registration.
Register for attending in-person: link
Register for attending online: link
November 2nd, 2023
9:45 – 10:00
Welcome Dr. Chinemelu J. Anumba
Introduction Karla Saldana Ochoa
10:00 – 1:15
Performing Plays
Moderator: Lee-Su Huang
Pierluigi D’Acunto/ TU Munich / Germany
Igor Pantic/ The Bartlett / England
Benjamin Ennemoser/ Texas A&M / USA
13:15 – 14:30
Lunch
14:30 – 17:45
Sculpting Images
Moderator: Adil Bokhari
Agostino Nickl/ ETH Zurich /Switzerland
Laure Michelon / UCLA / USA
16:30 – 16:45
Coffee break
16:45 - 17:45
Riccardo Villa / TU Vienna / Austria
17:45
Poster competition exhibit at the gallery
November 3rd, 2023
9:45 – 10:00
Welcome Dr. David Rifkind
Introduction Karla Saldana Ochoa
10:00 – 13:15
Texting Symbols
Moderator: Nikola Marincic
Vera Bühlmann/ TU Vienna / Austria
Michael Doyle / Universite Laval / Canada
Philippe Morel / The Bartlett / England
13:15 – 14:30
Lunch
14:30 – 16:15
Staging Machines
Moderator: Karla Saldana Ochoa
Tina Tallon/ University of Florida / USA
Julian Besems / The Bartlett / England
16:30 – 16:45
Coffee break
16:45 – 17:45
Heidi Boisvert / University of Florida / USA
17:45
Final Discussion
Playing Models Image Competition 2023
Call for Submissions:
The Playing Models Conference at the University of Florida proudly presents its 2nd Iteration and is excited to announce a special Image Competition as part of this year's proceedings.
Theme: Synthetic Vision
Submissions are invited of works crafted using AI-based imaging methods such as Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and more.
Eligibility:
Open to any student from any university worldwide.
Images should be generated primarily through AI methods.
Post-processing and further post-production enhancements are encouraged.
Submission Guidelines:
Submit a series of 5 images in A3 format, maintaining a resolution of 300 dpi.
Each Participant can submit multiple series.
Each Series should also have a unique title and be tagged with 5 hashtags.
Each series must include an accompanying text of 100-200 words. This text should ideally complement and expand upon the image series rather than merely describing it. You are free to incorporate quotations, emojis, and more.
Please note: Description of tools, prompts, and methods of composition is *not* mandatory.
Files should be in .png format.
Exhibition Details:Prizes:
A chance to have your work exhibited at the Playing Models Conference.
Cash prizes of $500 USD.
A collection of books related to the conference's theme.
Link to submission
Performing Plays: Facing the challenge of automated craftmanship
moderated by Lee-Su Huang
David Pye extolled the virtues of a "workmanship of risk", carried out by the practiced hand of the artisan, thereby conferring value to the resultant artifact. Faced with the deluge of options and possibilities presented by AI, and the seemingly endless noncommittal flirtation with potential, is AI architecture repeating the era of "paper" architecture in its intellectual rigor but practical marginalization? How can AI automation help us take risks and confront the challenge of substantiating and realizing these hallucinations? This panel will explore methods of digital craftsmanship to bring these visions to life, and how AI methods can augment and automate both the "conceptualizing" and the "building" of the built environment.
Pierluigi D’Acunto
Igor Pantic
Benjamin Ennemoser
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Sculpting Images: Engendering a geometry in the free-form and free-structure condition
moderated by: Adil Bokhari
The panel will discuss ways of articulating projects, specifically architectural projects, in the realm of contemporary, artificially intelligent imaging technologies. Sculpted faces that can begin to converse, wihtout being exhausted by their constitutive technologies. Bodies of knowledge that can begin to travel, without being reduced into singular systems. Mechanical constellations that can begin to move, without being caged within definitions.
How can disparate images that are simultaneously simulated, generated, sensed, and documented can be brought into composure? How can the myriad analog and digital technologies that shape architectural renderings and drawings be hosted in a new scale of geometry beyond representations and illustrations? How can an instrumentality be fabricated beyond the realm of the visible and the sensible?
Laure Michelon
Riccardo Villa
Agostino Nickl
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Texting Symbols: Negentropic writing beyond the planetary common sense
moderated by: Nikola Marincic
The remarkable output fidelity of recent large-language and text-to-image models evolved into par excellence rhetoric instruments, catching even the strictest techno-skeptics off guard. However, their ability to imitate, reword, and recontextualize information relies entirely on the existing corpus of human-generated work. They cannot plan, reason, or invent but are more than willing to sway us with their persuasive abilities. In a world inundated with images, an idea expressed symbolically, with its near-infinite degrees of freedom and potential for imagining what cannot yet be formulated, remains a crucial stronghold against anti-intellectual and anti-emancipatory efforts such powerful models could potentially endorse. This panel aims to discuss modalities of human/machine emancipation by symbolic means.
Vera Bühlmann
Michael Doyle
Philippe Morel
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Staging Machines: Immunizing tactics for sustaining constructive alienations
moderated by Karla Saldana Ochoa
"Staging Machines" hints at the spectacle before us – a spectacle of technology transforming the world around us. This panel will present provoking approaches and tactics that immunize our societies against the potentially alienating effects of this technological revolution and, instead, channel/bridge these energies towards constructive and imaginative ends. In this era of artificial intelligence, automation, and digital storytelling, the boundaries between creator and creation, reality and fiction, constantly shift. The panelists, designers, artists, and storytellers will address questions about data and the power of machines to design, narrate, and reimagine our world.
Julian Besems
Heidi Boisvert
Tina Tallon
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