Archinect - News

Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló overlaid with AI-informed artwork by Sofia Crespo

2024-01-30T11:46:00-05:00

Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona has served as the host for a major projection mapping artwork by Sofia Crespo over the weekend. Titled Structures of Being, the event drew 95,000 visitors across its showing on January 27th and 28th.

Image credit: Claudia Maurino

Created by Crespo with music by Robert M. Thomas, the project is described by organizers as “a spectacular setting that immersed the public in the nature contained inside Casa Batlló as well as in Gaudí's creative universe.” Created with the aid of artificial intelligence and the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, the project used data on the behavior of marine currents.

Image credit: Claudia Maurino

The artwork draws on Crespo’s interest in the boundaries of human perception in addition to her research into Gaudí’s own sources of inspiration. The resulting methodology saw Crespo use artificial neural networks to extract visual patterns from data inspired by the bra...

Refik Anadol's Machine Hallucinations generative AI piece acquired by MoMA

2023-10-11T15:59:00-04:00

Refik Anadol has made history as one of two prominent digital artists to have their works acquired into the permanent collection of the 94-year-old Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The museum announced its acquisition of Anadol’s 2022 Generative AI piece Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations, along with the blockchain-based piece 3FACE. 2022 from artist Ian Cheng, this week. Anadol's work was a gift to the museum by the 1OF1 Collection (which is led by Ryan Zurrer) and the RFC Collection, which is led by Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni.

Writing on Instagram, Anadol commended the museum’s curatorial decision, saying it “inscribes a historic chapter as MoMA welcomes the first Generative AI and tokenized artwork into its esteemed permanent collection.” The work was one of three made for last year’s special solo exhibition using a machine learning algorithm to interpret publicly available data taken from the museum’s collection to produce reinterpreted images that...

Maya Lin unveils 'Ghost Forest Seedlings' generative art project

2023-08-18T13:06:00-04:00

The artist, architect, and environmentalist Maya Lin is set to release her inaugural generative art project. Titled Ghost Forest Seedlings, and produced by Pace Verso with Web3 art innovators E.A.T_WORKS, the work will be released on September 18 to align with Climate Week NYC.

Ghost Forest Seedlings builds on Lin’s 2021 Ghost Forest installation, which saw 50 Atlantic white cedar trees placed in Madison Square Park to highlight Earth's fragility amidst the climate crisis. The latest artworks, each priced at $1,000, depict a seed or group of seeds that grow into an intricate root pattern over a predetermined amount of time. Each of the 500 unique works from the project will include three components: a signed print of the final root system, a generative NFT that shows the seedling’s evolution in real-time, and a video timelapse tracing the seedling’s complete growth pattern.

Portrait of Maya Lin. Image credit: Pace Gallery

“With Ghost Forest Seedlings, Lin explores the organic growth ...

MoMA to host Refik Anadol’s first solo US museum exhibition

2022-11-01T11:48:00-04:00

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has unveiled details of an upcoming exhibition featuring the work of media artist Refik Anadol. Titled Refik Anadol: Unsupervised, and open from November 19th, 2022 through March 5th 2023, the installation will feature three new digital artworks by the artist.

Image © Refik Anadol Studio, courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anadol’s three new pieces will use artificial intelligence to interpret more than 200 years of art from MoMA’s collection. Located on the museum’s ground floor, a 24 x 24-foot media wall will continuously generate new forms grounded in the intersection between technology, creativity, and modern art.

Image © Refik Anadol Studio, courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

“This project reshapes the relationship between the physical and the virtual, the real and the unreal,” said the exhibition’s organizer Michelle Kuo. “Often, AI is used to classify, process, and generate realistic representations of the world. An...

Scott Brownrigg's Rhondda Tunnel will transform a disused railway portal into the world's longest digital art space

2022-07-15T11:30:00-04:00

An imposing new cultural project will transform what was once a railway link in the Welsh countryside into what London-based studio Scott Browrigg says will be the world’s longest digital art space once it is completed in a few years.

By remaking the last vestiges of a 130-year-old abandoned rail tunnel formerly pegged to become a walking path and bike trail, the new arts-centered scheme will deliver an in-demand tourist destination that connects the two communities of Blaencwm and Blaengwynfi located at either end.

Image courtesy Scott Brownrigg

One might say this is a real windfall for the critically-important (especially in terms of an exhibition settings) area of wayfinding. The design made the cut for the recently-announced 2022 WAF shortlist in the Future Project: Culture category and will strive for a BREEAM Excellent rating, according to the firm.

To the east, the tunnel’s entrance will be defined by either a land art referencing hotel, while in its west, on the Blaengwynfi s...

Refik Anadol's Casa Batlló NFT sells for $1.38 million

2022-05-11T11:32:00-04:00

A landmark of the Art Nouveau style is on center stage after Refik Anadol’s NFT of the Casa Batlló sold for $1.38 million at Christe’s 21st Century Evening Sale last night.

Titled Living Architecture: Casa Batlló, the piece was commissioned by the group responsible for managing Gaudí’s converted House of Bones last year and is currently on display in a larger format outside the Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza headquarters until May 13. It was also the lone digital-only lot to sell in the auction house’s marquee New York spring sales events this week.

Previously on Archinect: Refik Anadol unveils ‘first-of-its-kind’ AI artwork NFTs

A spokesperson with the Casa Batlló named Gary Gautier called Anadol a “perfect fellow traveler” and told reporters that his work “resides between art and technology, expands the possibilities of architecture and brings a new outlook beyond space and time.” Gautier also commented that the Turkish-American artist “connects past, present and future, reminding u...

Zaha Hadid Architects' NFTism exhibition at Art Basel Miami proposes a new standard in digital architecture and the metaverse

2021-12-03T19:36:00-05:00

As Art Basel Miami Beach draws to a close this weekend, the twin buzzwords of NFTs and the metaverse have been left ringing throughout the convention hall with the notion that the oft-dismissed digital art platform will invariably become an art fair mainstay as the critical acceptance of the works and their medium continues to grow.

Going into this year’s rendition, many attendees and other interested observers were eager to see how Big A architecture might respond to the new mandate for metaverse spaces with showcase designs that offer real-world locations to host and display the blockchain technology.

Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects

Zaha Hadid Architects took up the mantle with a virtual gallery that houses a dynamic multi-artist exhibition its curator compared, favorably, to a Trojan Horse. The studio says its spatial design focuses on the user’s experience and interaction with one another along with the theatrical presentation of the virtual exhibition itself.

Image courtes...

Artist Nick Relph is turning New York’s development boom into digital art ‘scans’

2021-11-20T09:00:00-05:00

Relph’s collection might be described as the first post-internet expression of the genre. The images mostly show buildings that are, in one sense, real or in the process of becoming so. But the rendering posters, created by design firms and developers, are also highly fictive, cinematic branding documents created to comply with a city law requiring public images of buildings under construction.

The arch flaneur Nick Relph has been documenting the city’s whirlwind transformation since the Gulliani administration and, for the past seven years, incorporating a VuPoint digital scanner into his work to produce a physical record of the changes that first made its debut in 2015 in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York survey.

Relph’s new book, called Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax, hit the shelves this month from publisher Pre-Echo.

“It was really about just having the scanner with me in my bag when I was walking around,” the 42-year-old Relph told the Times’ Randy Kennedy. “I’m a walker. That’s how I make work, generally speaking. I just couldn’t ignore these posters, these very stark images. I pay attention to images. And the purpose of these is in one sense clearly defined and in another not at all.”

Image courtesy Pre-Echo Press

Two giant digital art installations open in Times Square

2021-07-19T13:15:00-04:00

Two immersive, site-specific media art installations evoking natural water landscapes, produced by a'strict, will be displayed at Times Square during New York's hottest summer months. From July 16 to Aug. 2, the group's gigantic whale and waterfall will appear before the eyes of millions in the U.S. for the first time.

The Korean media artist group a'strict has previously made a splash with its recent WAVE project outside of a mall in Seoul's Gangnam District. The aquatic digital 3D sculpture bears more than a passing resemblance to a piece by Olafur Eliasson that was installed in 2008.

A group called Silvercast is hosting the installation on its 30,000-square-foot Big Kahuna digital billboard. The whale will appear in 60-second intervals every half hour from 12pm until midnight.

The Korea Times has more on the summery new artworks here.

A in #TimesSquare. Check out this digital art work taking over a 30,000 sq. ft. @SILVERCASTMedia screen in the heart of Times Square. Launched today and runs through July 26 every half hour. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/aKnpd7TTxt
— Times Square (@TimesSquareNYC) July 16, 2021

LA's A+D Museum to close physical location and go virtual

2020-06-18T14:12:00-04:00

The Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles (A+D) has announced an institutional restructuring initiative as well as a transformation focus on digital and traveling exhibitions and programming in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a statement published by the museum, Executive Director Anthony Morey and Deputy Director Leila Wahba write, “A+D Museum’s mission to be a platform and space of engagement for our architects, designers, creatives, and audience must shift with the needs of our community. As a team we have heard the response to societal shifts and as a family we recognize the opportunity to transform ourselves in response to this place in time."

The museum leaders add, "We are thrilled to evolve, to become a more dynamic expression of our mission and our supporter’s needs. By transitioning to a hybridized platform structure, we release ourselves from a solitary physical presence and embrace a more expansive presence, a long discussed goal of our Beyond Walls Strate...

Looking back at One Take Architects' pop-up digital art museum in Beijing, inspired by the Himalayan landscape

2020-03-18T14:57:00-04:00

In 2019, Hangzhou-based One Take Architects completed the Mandala Pop-up Digital Art Museum, which was a temporary structure showcasing an immersive multi-media exhibition inspired by the Himalayan landscape and arts and culture. The architects envisioned the pop-up museum as a utopian, isolated garden in the heart of bustling Beijing.

Photo: Wang Shilu.

Photo: Nan Xueqian.

Featuring facade lines inspired by the Tibetan Himalayan mountain Namcha Barwa, the museum was designed like a set of blocks that can be split and reorganized into a “dKyil-‘khor”, an inner palace in Chinese Buddhism and which translates into “mandala” in English.

Concealed from the outside, the building measured over 50 meters long, was less than 5 meters tall, and had a width of less than 9 meters. As visitors move through the art museum, they could chart their own path to create their own experience, encountering immersive digital art, changing lights, reflective mirrors, sca...

Trans.figure: Reflecting on UCLA's IDEAS Campus Summer Exhibition

2019-11-01T18:29:00-04:00

With the summer season behind us and a new term just started, Archinect takes a moment to showcase the work of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design's IDEAS campus located near Culver City, Calif. The campus is an incubator for exploration of various examples of digital design software, fabrication techniques, and other tools to help students during their introduction to the post-professional Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design program.

Work presented at the UCLA IDEAS Summer Exhibition 2019. Image courtesy of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design

At the IDEAS campus, students are able to work and collaborate with faculty while examining four areas of research within the architecture profession: Entertainment, Mobility, Technology, and Urban Strategy.

Work presented at the UCLA IDEAS Summer Exhibition 2019. Image courtesy of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design

For this year's exhibition, the studio explored and experimented with objects curated from contemporary sculptures f...

An immersive 35,000 square foot art park opens in Los Angeles' Arts District

2019-01-14T15:32:00-05:00

The Arts District in downtown Los Angeles is filled with several must-see locations. Now home to one of the world's first fully immersive entertainment art park, Wisdome LA allows for visitors to enter into unforgettable audio and visual experience. The park features five fully immersive domes that are outfitted for 360-degree visual and audio entertainment. Each dome is fitted with 10.1 surround sound to enhance the shared VR experience that showcases the future of art, entertainment, and technology.

Image @ Wisdome LA

The park can hold up to 1,000 people inside and around the domes. Through the use of 360-degree projection mapping technology, the domes display beautifully mesmerizing images. The centerpiece of the exhibition will feature renowned digital artist Android Jones and his project, Samskara. "This city is one of the creative capitals of the worlds and is filled with people looking to learn, try something different, a...

As augmented reality further permeates the urban environment, do architects play a role in planning virtual spaces?

2018-10-03T17:59:00-04:00

Over the past couple of decades, artists and designers have developed augmented realities that propose vastly different, and often more radical perspectives of what a digitally enhanced public realm could look like. [...] many actually existing AR projects instead ask critical questions about the implementation of this novel technology and its potential to shift both the everyday experiences and political economies of architecture and cities.

In his latest Failed Architecture piece, Joshua McWhirter offers an insightful history of noteworthy augmented reality-powered works of art, activism, game design, and simulation while also issuing a warning call about the impending privatization and commodification of the virtual public space without much input from architects. "And as this landscape increasingly constitutes a public realm in and of itself," McWhirter writes, "a collection of hybrid real-virtual public spaces, there are even glimmers of direct challenges to its creeping privatization."

The first digital art museum in Paris opens with a Klimt exhibition

2018-07-27T15:47:00-04:00

The museum is in a former foundry and is operated by Culturespaces, a French museum foundation that specialise in immersive art displays. This is the opening exhibition at what Culturespaces calls its “Workshop of Lights”, and its larger space, La Halle, is dedicated to Gustav Klimt and a century of Viennese painting. There are also works by Egon Schiele and Friedrich Stowasser, better-known as Hundertwasser.

The museum foundation Culturespaces recently opened Paris’s first digital museum of fine art, Atelier des Lumières, with an opening exhibition displaying works by Gustav Klimt. The former foundry has been transformed into an immersive, multi-sensory space expanding artworks across the entire architectural interior.

Atelier des Lumières, Paris. Image: E Spiller.

The museum utilizes 140 laser video projectors to display works across 32-foot-high walls and over 11,000 square feet of surface area within the renovated 19th-century building. With the growing digital engagement of culture, the museum aims to disseminate art through relevant methods for future generations.

Klimt display at Atelier des Lumières, Paris. Image: E Spiller.

An augmented reality art exhibit hijacks MoMA's Jackson Pollock gallery

2018-04-27T14:57:00-04:00

NEW YORK’S MUSEUM of Modern Art is under siege. Well, a virtual siege, at least. A group of renegade artists has co-opted the brightly-lit Jackson Pollock gallery on the museum’s fifth floor, turning it into their personal augmented reality playground. [...] those that have downloaded the MoMAR Gallery app on their smartphones, the impressionist's iconic paintings are merely markers—points of reference telling the app where to display the guerilla artists’ works.

MoMAR's augmented reality app and the unauthorized accompanying group show Hello, we're from the internet explore the intersection of private physical space and the public digital realm. "MoMAR is an unauthorized gallery concept aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, museums, and the curation of art within them," the group explains on its website. "MoMAR is non-profit, non-owned, and exists in the absence of any privatized structures."

Get the app on Android or iOS and head to MoMA's Jackson Pollock room on the 5th floor to see Hello, we're from the internet until May 3.

ZHA projects light on 18th century castle

2017-09-20T14:08:00-04:00

‘Behaviour Morphe’ is a collaboration between Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), digital artists and computer science researchers Andy Lomas and Mubbasir Kapadia, and musician Max Cooper. It consists of dynamic light mapping projections on Karlsruhe’s Baroque castle in Germany. The piece was created for the 2017 Schlosslichtspiele Festival, which presents projections on the 170 meters facade of the castle. Schlosslichtspiele marries digital art and 18th century German masonry to create unique works.

Behaviour Morphe’ by ZHA for Schlosslichtspiele Festival 2017

In “Behaviour Morphe” ZHA presents its latest digital spatial simulation tools used for the analysis and design of its architecture. The projection interacts with the spaces of the castle using real time data, highlighting the research of ZHA’s Computational Design (ZH CODE) on iterative systems of development.

Behaviour Morphe’ by ZHA for Schlosslichtspiele Festival 2017

Musician Max Cooper said, “ZHA's ideas and work fit well with ...

"The museum in the machine": The Digital Museum of Digital Art, on view IRL in Brooklyn

2015-12-21T14:19:00-05:00

Imagine visiting a museum while playing a video game. DiMoDA is essentially that: the museum in the machine, the shell in the ghost. Whoever has played Super Mario 64 will be right at home. With “wings” that you visit through portals housed within the museum’s “walls,” DiMoDA is a gateway station to art. With that in mind, Salazar-Caro took an iconic approach to the design of DiMoDA, making it recognizable and striking amid what will be a mutable, shifting cosmos of wings...

"You can visit DiMoDA on your Mac or PC, or with the superior Oculus Rift experience that is available to visitors at TRANSFER. The gallery also has a 3D printed model of DiMoDA by Salazar-Caro on display, along with a non–Oculus Rift DiMoDA station. Somewhat ironically, it turns out that the best way to experience this virtual world is in a physical gallery, with credit going to TRANSFER for providing the best possible experience and introduction."