Fake Attention

Abstract

Rather than taking a techno-positivist position on the digital, computation might be approached critically as a medium with the capacity to affect, manage, and disrupt. Within this context, architectural applications of machine learning might productively agitate the stability of our defined disciplinary conventions (particularly in relationship to methods of production motivated by typology). These moments of friction where conventions come into contact with external systems of AI technology are explored. This paper proposes to fold these tendencies back into the way we think about making architecture; back into our processes and pedagogies to develop a reciprocal and discursive relationship with technology. By leaving space to foster attention, the paper’s mission is to develop skills that allow us to see the world anew and to become aware of the coded ways in which both technologies and the physical stuff of the world are motivated by hidden systems and to open up new frameworks for reconstructing our existing practices and conventions.