ARCHITECTURAL INCEPTION: Dose AI Dream of Lost Futures?
The emerging technologies of AI art generation visualize ideas through text-image synthesis within enormous datasets of digital media, which offers alternative approaches to investigate the media-infused concepts of the future in contemporary imagination. Among the collective knowledge of visual cultures that shape AI creativity, architecture is particularly relevant for framing future conditions of various concepts in an age of global urbanization. The architectural paradigms of AI-generated futures inform not only the cultural tendencies toward socio-technological progress but also the cultural risks of future narratives across the AI-augmented creative practice. Accordingly, through active human intervention, can AI facilitate thought experiments on alternative futures of contemporary imagination?

which results in 300 pairs of loosely-framed concepts to represent 'future' by AI's collective knowledge.
Taking the open-source AI model Stable Diffusion as an idea synthesis device of contemporary culture, this project conducts a series of text-image generation exercises on future concepts to uncover the cultural stagnation of architectural imagination associated with cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s argument on the slow cancellation of the future.


Following Fisher’s melancholic call for hauntological cultures to retrieve the radical impulses of lost futures, the project initiates an open-ended experiment of architectural inception, as referring to the dream implementation from Christopher Nolan's 2010 movie Inception, to implement the lost futures of megastructure movements into Stable Diffusion’s collective knowledge.



which is deemed suitable as a conceptual reference to reimagine megastructure in Stable Diffusion.


As an intermediate result of AI model fine-tuning with Google’s DreamBooth technique, my personalized Stable Diffusion model generates alternative images of contemporary and future scenarios haunted by megastructure concepts with technical limitations. In addition to bridging the latest AI technologies with architectural discourse, the project demonstrates the cultural capacity of architecture as a visual carrier of thought instruments to break through the cultural stagnation of contemporary imagination for alternative futures.

