In this round-table discussion, the four researchers look at the issue of transition through the prism of the different notions of maintenance, transformation, repair and restoration. These concepts are reminiscent of the issues of destruction, reconstruction and rehabilitation in architecture.
AI is a new form of intelligence whose development is stirring up concerns and dystopian fables. Far from replacing human intelligence, AIs are emerging as new tools to be trained, controlled and shaped to achieve the desired result. For the artist, photographer, architect, film-maker, musician or illustrator, AIs become an agent with which to collaborate, resulting in co-creation. Inaugural lecture of the “AI and Creation” series at the Stream Innovation Center.
Theoretical experiments around the concept of the “metabolic-city” place living organisms at the heart of a new paradigm, encouraging a systemic approach. In urban and architectural practice, what tools are available to measure metabolism? Pauline Detavernier, Doctor in Architecture and Research and Development Project Manager at PCA-STREAM, examines existing measures of the life cycle and urban metabolism to outline a methodology.
Using scientific facts as artistic material, Dutch artist Thijs Biersterker seeks to emotionally connect the public to global questions, to inspire a desire to take action. He uses technology, in particular AI, as a medium. His immersive installations highlight the intelligence and communication systems of plants: thus creating a bridge between living beings.
Hubert Beroche is the founder of the Urban AI think tank, dedicated to the field of urban artificial intelligence. He is the curator of the Eyes on the street lecture series, run together in partnership with the SCAI (Sorbonne Center for Artifical Intelligence), and explains here how urban AI can help us understand the city.
François Taddei is a geneticist and co-founder, with Ariel Lindner, of the Learning Planet Institute (formerly known as CRI). Conceived as a school for the 21st century, the institute combines artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to reinvent ways of learning, teaching and doing research.
These days we are generating a lot of data simply by carrying our phones around and consenting cookies on websites. While some of the data collected can be accessed by researchers for social good, other data is being used to provide targeted advertisements. Companies buy and sell our data, what is currently lacking is a mechanism for individuals to get a grasp of where their personal data is being used and for what purpose. An article by Saulė Gabrielė, Nadia Leonova and Lukas Utzig, Urban AI’s Emerging Leaders. Discover the extended version, Who owns your data ?
Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
The notion of urban metabolism can be viewed in several ways. From a quantitative perspective, by considering flows; from a political ecology perspective, by considering social factors; and from an urban design perspective, by considering the sum of intertwined environmental and social ecosystems beyond administrative borders. In each of these approaches, urban technologies and the availability of data provide exciting prospects. To read the extended version : Do cities metabolize?
Jérôme Denis is a research professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech. He examines the invisible work required by data processing (including in urban contexts), as well as on an approach to maintenance grounded in care. The focus afforded to material fragility, far from stabilizing the condition of objects, becomes inextricably involved in their future.
What we are currently calling AI has, in fact, very little to do with intelligence, although it does indeed make use of tremendous memory capabilities and computing power. The leading figure of French robotics, Bruno Maisonnier, is engaged in the challenge of developing an AI operating like a brain, using very little energy and data, while also being capable of justifying decisions. Would this be an AI with self-learning capabilities?
Artificial intelligence sparks as much enthusiasm as fear in its applications in the built and urban environment. Architect and data scientist Stanislas Chaillou puts this innovation into perspective by replacing in its technological timeline and demystifying the way it operates, which is in fact based on statistical learning. AI brings three major contributions to architects: assistance (for tedious chores), options (in the iterative design process), and the connection to context (by taking better account of local data). AI thus carries less of a risk of standardization than an opportunity to develop a style, to adapt to multiple contexts, and to vastly increase the capabilities of architects.
While the Anthropocene confronts us with our indissociable connection with Earth, for Refik Anadol we are living in an hybrid reality born out of the ubiquity of technological systems. He is engaged in the quest for a universal language to express this new era where the real and virtual worlds are intertwined, experimenting through prospective forms of representation which materialize data sets.
Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder of the MetaLab at Harvard, a center dedicated to innovation in the networked arts and humanities. We meet Schnapp at the Piaggio Fast Forward center in Boston, a company which he is the CEO of, focused on the development of innovative mobility solutions. He tells us about design processes for the XXIst century, including how smart vehicles are key operative agents inside the built environment.
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!