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Phenomenal Flesh
2021
‘Making Strange': AI as a tool for Perceptual Renewal
Using AI image datasets from Michelangelo's Laurentian Library (1571) and Michelangelo's Sistine nudes, a set of digital paintings emerge that 'make strange' classical architectural compositions through exploring an agglutination between figural and built worlds.
‘Estrangement' (as Frederic Jameson describes in ‘Archaeologies of the Future…’ (2005) regarding science-fiction literary principles) is a tool to imagine ‘difference', achieved by chopping and displacing familiar elements into different contexts in order to renew our perception of them.
Michelangelo employed processes of estrangement in the Laurentian Library, using a framework of manoeuvres which he adopted from sculpting figures (such as abstraction, displacement, inversion) to ‘make strange' the classical orders and therefore challenge the abilities of his 16th Century literary-class audience to inscribe the space through a system of 'fixed' classical orders of which they were already familiar.
Here, the machines' quotation and regurgitation of AI imagery reproduces architectural elements in a new hybrid formation, estranging them from the set of conventional proportions and relationships upon which their meaning depends.
The result is a new linguistic proposal for an architecture invested with the expression and tension of the figure. Endowed with bodily attributes, the architecture facilitates interpretations that search for meaning beyond established architectonic structures, and might even increases our own corporeal awareness through its foregrounding of ‘fleshiness’ - a phenomenon that Heinrich Wölfflin elaborates in his theory of empathy (1994).
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