Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators
by Matias del Campo, Lev Manovich
3D Diffusion or 3D Disfiguration?
Immanuel Koh
…her face filled eight boxes … in one, for instance, her eyes were laughing cruelly, but in the next they were filled with sadness. (pp117‐118)
The passage above is a quote from the novel “Klara and the Sun” written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published in 2021. Here, Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, masterfully narrates from the perspective of the main character Klara (one of those robotic humanoids called Artificial Friends or AFs in the book) during a trip to a waterfall with its owner’s mother. More specifically, Klara’s vision becomes “partitioned” when confronted with the Mother’s perplexing human facial expression as she struggles to come to terms with the potentially fatal illness of her 14‐year‐old daughter Josie. The aesthetics of the novel is undeniably cubist, an unexpected departure from his earlier novels, where a surrealist’s aesthetics dominates. For instance, in this other passage, the imagery of a woman being object‐classified similar to a coffee cup soon gives way to a form of artificial hypercubism with the disfiguration of bodies,
“Then the Coffee Cup Lady reached the RPO Building side, and she and the man were holding each other so tightly they were like one large person.” (p24)
Terms and phrases such as “partitioning,” “a series of interlocking grids,” “the Sun’s pattern,” “Open Plan,” “blurred black‐and‐white pattern,” and “rooms within rooms,” allude to a new architectural aesthetics strangely ...