stunning exhibition celebrate artistry
Small wonders: stunning exhibition celebrates artistry of model buildings
When the eerily accurate AI image generator Dall-E 2 was released for public experimentation by OpenAI this summer, most people immediately used it to create whimsical scenes such as "samurai dolphin painted in the style of Rembrandt" or "Bruce Willis angrily devouring a cheeseburger on the moon". True, if you looked too closely at Bruce's left ear you might have noticed it wasn't there – but the freaky glitches were, though somewhat unsettling, part of the fun, not to mention a calming reminder that AI cannot entirely trick us that its images are real – yet. But more than one panicked architect also typed in, "Four-storey family home in forest in the style of Mies van der Rohe" or "Japanese-Scandi lounge area in office building lobby", and let out a tiny scream when the results resembled the renders of projects that architects otherwise spend long hours churning out. If an AI could knock out a decent interior in seconds, did it promise to be a fabulous time-saver – or would it put everyone out of a job? Not only does it celebrate the painstaking construction of physical structures, complete with tiny people and fake trees like a model railway set, which clearly took ages to make and no AI could come close to replicating – yet, but these models are also animatronic: they move, open, chirp, whirr, creak and close like Victorian clockwork figurines or the childlike works of Rodney Peppe.