FAMILIAR OBJECTS | ARCH583

Professor Patrick Danahy | Design Elective | Fall 2022

“The speculum of speculation is not a thin, flat plate of glass onto which a layer of molten aluminum has been vacuum-sprayed but a funhouse mirror made of hammered metal, whose distortions show us a perversion of a unit’s sensibilities.” - Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing.

Using a multi-layered image-based and geometric machine learning process, this project involved the build up of speculum facade objects and study representations through the lens of speculative realist philosophies and ‘Object Oriented Ontology’. An analysis of ‘facades’ were developed through digital surveying and photogrammetric scanning. These 3D Scanned artifacts became the speculum, or perverse mirror of the thing (facade) itself. By withdrawing or veiling its ontological reading, the speculum distorts the ontography of its mirror. The scanned objects are percieved as hollow shells, and or images of their twins. Parts of these objects are reduced to unified continuous wholes, lacking assemblage, or discreteness. Scanning produces the first layer of ontological withdrawal toward a speculum object. These speculum objects then are processed using machine perception and predictive AI models to defamiliarize and veil them from their original context. In this way these are not representational objects but instead they become their own ontological units, existing as the perversion of their mirror. With this project when starting with a scan, not of architecture but of a natural found cliff face, the artifact rendered aimed to develop a symbiosis with nature focusing on texturing, material decay, and zoomorphic projections using what is called DiscoDiffusion. This early work in image processing via machine learning development allowed for the artifact to develop visual sympathies with the familiar features of nature, be that the fuzzy texture of a bee, the venation of leaves, or the eroded rock of a cliffside. This work was mostly developed prior to the popularization of Midjourney, ChatGPT and other open sourced AI tools and or applications.

DIFFUSION IMAGE OUTPUTS FROM UNROLLED TEXTURES https://www.lulu.com/shop/casey-stamm/native-assemblies-geo-digital-hybrids/paperback/product-w9p4zd.html?q=NATIVE+ASSEMBLIES&page=1&pageSize=4