Towards Hallucinating Machines - Designing with Computational Vision

Abstract

There are particular similarities in how machines learn about the nature of their environment, and how humans learn to process visual stimuli. Machine Learning (ML), more specifically Deep Neural network algorithms rely on expansive image databases and various training methods (supervised, unsupervised) to “make sense” out of the content of an image. Take for example how students of architecture learn to differentiate various architectural styles. Whether this be to differentiate between Gothic, Baroque or Modern Architecture, students are exposed to hundreds, or even thousands of images of the respective styles, while being trained by faculty to be able to differentiate between those styles. A reversal of the process, striving to produce imagery, instead of reading it and understanding its content, allows machine vision techniques to be utilized as a design methodology that profoundly interrogates aspects of agency and authorship in the presence of Artificial Intelligence in architecture design. This notion forms part of a larger conversation on the nature of human ingenuity operating within a posthuman design ecology. The inherent ability of Neural Networks to process large databases opens up the opportunity to sift through the enormous repositories of imagery generated by the architecture discipline through the ages in order to find novel and bespoke solutions to architectural problems. This article strives to demystify the romantic idea of individual artistic design choices in architecture by providing a glimpse under the hood of the inner workings of Neural Network processes, and thus the extent of their ability to inform architectural design.The approach takes cues from the language and methods employed by experts in Deep Learning such as Hallucinations, Dreaming, Style Transfer and Vision. The presented approach is the base for an in-depth exploration of its meaning as a cultural technique within the discipline. Culture in the extent of this article pertains to ideas such as the differentiation between symbolic and material cultures, in which symbols are defined as the common denominator of a specific group of people.1The understanding and exchange of symbolic values is inherently connected to language and code, which ultimately form the ingrained texture of any form of coded environment, including the coded structure of Neural Networks.A first proof of concept project was devised by the authors in the form of the Robot Garden. What makes the Robot Garden a distinctively novel project is the motion from a purely two dimensional approach to designing with the aid of Neural Networks, to the exploration of 2D to 3D Neural Style Transfer methods in the design process.