Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators
by Matias del Campo, Lev Manovich
Allies in Exile
Kyle Steinfeld
Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in an alternate history in which the US government provisioned land in Alaska in 1940 for the refugee settlement of European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. With the fledgling State of Israel destroyed in 1948, European Jewry found a new home not in New York, but in Sitka, a large, Yiddish‐speaking metropolis initially established as a small temporary settlement on unceded Tlingit tribal land. The plot centers on the illicit construction of an architecture, and unfolds within atmospheric world that blends Jewish and Tlingit cultures, in the Alaskan landscape. Thematically, this work, that is set in an alternative present explores a breadth of issues that resonate with our actual present, including: identity and community; extremism and assimilation; and cross‐cultural contact, friction, and appropriation. Chabon’s writing is vivid, and since reading this work, I’ve been a bit obsessed with his imaginary Sitka‐something like a 19th ‐ century Vienna in the Arctic. What would the material culture of this place be like? How would the trauma and traditions of people from the old world experience modernity in this unique climate and cultural situation? Would Jewish design and culture harmoniously meld with the indigenous traditions (Tlingit talit, anyone?), or would this alternate history rhyme with our own, with the transplanted heart of Jewish life beset by issues of exploitation, appropriation, ...