Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators
by Matias del Campo, Lev Manovich
Rice or Pasta? Choose Your AI
Mario Carpo
Many years ago, on a warm, early summer day toward the end of the last millennium, I was visiting my parents in my ancestral hometown at the feet of the Western Alps, in Northern Italy. I was traveling in the company of my then girlfriend, a born and bred New Englander, who was of course much intrigued by the traditions and customs of that old, primitive land. I watched your mother cook risotto last night, she told me, and I am certain she never used any measuring tool. She has no scales in her kitchen; nor measuring cups for flour, grains or liquid. I did not see a thermometer, not even a dial on the oven; nor a timer; and I am pretty certain she never looked at her watch. How can she cook? I have no clue, I replied; evidently, the risotto was edible; why do you not query her, discreetly, tomorrow? And so she did, and it turned out that my mother's reply to every query involving the use of measurable quantities in her cooking (how much of it? to what temperature? for how long...?) was “well, it shows;” or, “you can tell” (apparently, my friend inferred, my mother's telling was based on color, odor, or touch). My friend concluded, while we were on our way back to the airport a few days later: your mother‐‐and, I think she added, this entire country‐‐seem to live in a timeless universe of approximation; the modern world of precision, and the spirit of modern science and technology, based on numbers and quantification, never made it to ...