This collection of work aims to explore how new advances in both generative artificial intelligence models, material simulation, and additive manufacturing could allow for a flattening of figural, indexical, and figurative strategies in the design of objects; perceptually bluring these distintions. Historically, design strategies in furniture design have privileged one strategy over the other. Historical thrones and liturgical furniture often featured ornamentation conveying narrative signifiers, carved or adhered into standard furniture forms. Furniture from the modern period privileged material and industrial production constraints to produce abstract forms. The earlier digital period utilized the sophistication in formal production and digital fabrication technology to produce abstracted forms driven through the simulation of arbitrary forces to blur the legibility of furniture as an object of utility.
This history, as documented through the collective aggregation of aesthetic content on the internet, has been compressed in a non-hierarchical archive embodied by the current generative AI models accessible to designers. The probabilistic feature recognition utilized by generative models is inherently nihilistic in respect to art/design theory. The work assembled here aims to leverage this and produce innovative aesthetics which oscillate between disparate aesthetic paradigms. Similarly, contemporary video models represent a compressed archive of human behavior mined from film, television, and social media. As an additional outcome, the project explores the ability of these models to simulate behavior and speculate on user impacts made by the final designs.
2025.
Tools + Tech.
· rhino3D · .gh · processing · robotstudio · houdini · blender · zbrush · google colab [img-to-img via disco diffusion + neuralstyle transfer]
· comfyui [img-to-img via stable difusion + control nets + style transfer] · hunyuan3d [image-to-3d] · kling ai