A shower of pink petals rains down in slow motion against an ethereal backdrop of minimalist white arches, bathed in the soft focus of a cosmetics advert. The camera pulls back to reveal the petals have clustered together to form a delicate puffy armchair, standing in the centre of a temple-like space, surrounded by a dreamy landscape of fluffy pink trees. It looks like a luxury zen retreat, as conceived by Glossier.
The aesthetic is eerily familiar: these are the pastel tones, tactile textures and ubiquitous arches of Instagram architecture, an amalgamation of design tropes specifically honed for likes. An ode to millennial pink, this computer-rendered scene has been finely tuned to seduce the social media algorithm, calibrated to slide into your feed like a sugary tranquilliser, promising to envelop you in its candy-floss embrace.
What makes it different from countless other such CGI visions that populate the infinite scroll is that this implausible chair now exists in reality. In front of the video, on show in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), stands the Hortensia chair, a vision of blossomy luxury plucked from the screen and fabricated from thousands of laser-cut pink fabric petals – yours for about £5,000.
It is the work of digital artist Andrés Reisinger, who minted the original digital chair design as an NFT after his images went viral on Instagram in 2018. He was soon approached by collectors asking where they could buy the real thing, so he decided to make it – with the help of product designer Júlia Esqué and furniture brand Moooi – first as a limited edition, and now adapted for serial production. It was the first time that an armchair had been willed into being by likes and shares, a physical product spawned from the dark matter of the algorithm.
It is one of many such projects that occupy the slippery realm between the virtual and the real in the MAK’s new exhibition, /imagine: A Journey Into the New Virtual. It takes its title from the command that users input intoAI software Midjourney, to create their own unearthly visions – a tool that has since rendered the technical skills of digital artists such as Reisinger all but useless. Midjourney could generate a pink petal chair in seconds and give you several alternatives while it’s at it. For the anodyne marketing blurb, look no further than ChatGPT.
Given the pace at which such technologies are developing, it is an ambitious subject for the comparatively slow-moving beast of a state-owned museum to tackle. But the curators, Bika Rebek and Marlies Wirth, have done an admirable job of assembling an accessible snapshot of the last decade of forays into the virtual realm, ranging from designers who have gleefully embraced the promise of the metaverse, to those sounding alarm bells about the direction we are heading in.
In the latter category, Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari presents a series of Assyrian artefacts that were destroyed by Islamic State, which she has digitally reconstructed from photographs and 3D-printed in translucent plastic. Each contains a thumb-drive, suspended like a fly in amber, containing maps, videos and information about the destroyed artefacts, like digital time capsules. In an accompanying video lecture, Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism , Allahyari describes the violence of IS and the more hidden violence of western big tech. By digitally appropriating and profiting from scans of historical objects and sites, without considering who that data should belong to and how it should be distributed, are the likes of Google guilty of a new form of digital colonialism?
In a similar vein, a screen nearby shows snippets from a virtual reality video game developed by Ethiopian designer, Miriam Hillawi Abraham. Set in the Unesco world heritage site of Lalibela, home to 12th-century rock-hewn churches, the game allows players to experience the story from three different male perspectives, including an Indiana Jones-style white saviour archaeologist who appears to be set on looting the site’s treasures. As a foil to these familiar patriarchal perspectives, however, is a fourth female character, formed from a combination of figures that Abraham discovered had been overlooked in the official history of the site. It’s a clever way to use this playable, interactive medium to question accepted narratives and open up new perspectives on archeological heritage.
Other projects explore the reach of the virtual into the home. Researcher and designer Simone C Niquille takes a pleasingly sideways look at the hidden workings of domestic smart technology in her short film, Homeschool, which she made using the 3D datasets for training consumer robots, such as Roomba vacuum cleaners, on how to navigate our homes. It is filmed, in grainy computational vision, from the perspective of a roaming robo-cleaner, and narrated by its innocent childlike voice, as it encounters new objects that it hadn’t been programmed to recognise. The result is a poetic meditation on the pitfalls of robotic intelligence, making visible the hidden training data sealed inside the smart tech, and raising questions about categorisation and cultural bias built into these model digital environments. It is rendered with a beguiling, lo-fi aesthetic (made by using an artificially intelligent denoising filter, trained on thousands of images of domestic scenes), making it look as if this little vacuum cleaner might have made the film all by itself. Who knows, maybe it did?
Such a broad topic has inevitably resulted in a show that feels a bit hit and miss. There are too many mindless renders of Instagram-friendly spaces that look like Aesop concept stores or oligarchs’ villas and a tedious film of an imaginary train ride through CGI landscapes (also minted as an NFT, natch). But there are plenty of other things to chew on. Spanish-Swedish duo Space Popular are showing a second, expanded iteration of their Portal Galleries (first shown at the Sir John Soane’s Museum last year), exploring the future mechanics of moving between different virtual worlds. Detroit-based architect and game designer Jose Sanchez has developed a pair of simulation games, one geared towards growing an ecological city, the other exploring community collaboration and the equitable growth of neighbourhoods. Kordae Jatafa Henry has made a stirring short film addressing the future of rare earth mines in The Democratic Republic of the Congo, imagining a time when these sites of extraction are reclaimed through dance and ritual.
Elsewhere, we see the limits of AI applied to an architectural context and perhaps a generational difference in how designers are approaching these tools. Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger – who have been “working with new technologies and artificial intelligence since the 1990s” according to the caption – have used Midjourney to generate cross-section drawings of imaginary buildings for animals. For the exhibition, they have tried to translate this into three dimensions, by CNC-milling a polystyrene “doghouse” based on one of the AI images. Midjourney might be impressive in 2D, but the result in 3D falls flat, simply standing as a four-sided box made of the extruded sections. Still, it might come as a relief to architects that they’re not fully replaceable quite yet.
Finally, our current predicament is aptly skewered by Leah Wulfman in a project called My Mid Journey Trash Pile, which provides a fitting conclusion to proceedings. While others are using AI to conjure fantasy villas and dreamy sci-fi cities, Wulfman is holding up a mirror to the great AI experiment – and reflecting a heap of trash. Their project features hundreds of images of tattered buildings made of plastic bags, recycled bottles, refuse sacks and piles of old junk, the wonky, battered forms suggesting things such as water towers, mills or grain silos – words that Wulfman uses in the AI prompts. For this exhibition, they commissioned a series of oil paintings of their images from a Chinese painting factory, adding an extra layer of manual interpretation to the automated visions. The result is a smeary feedback loop of human and digital supply chains, left intentionally unclear whose intelligence, and whose glitches, we are looking at. It is an unnerving apparition of a possible post-digital world, a place hastily cobbled together from the landfill of 21st-century detritus – a shanty world where we can dream of lounging on petal armchairs in sleek cliff-top villas, rendered in soothing pastel shades.
