Participants

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lev Manovich

Digital Culture Theorist and Artist

Dr. Lev Manovich is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab.

In 2013 Manovich appeared in the List of 25 People Shaping the Future of Design (Complex). In 2014 he was included in the list of 50 most interesting people building the future (The Verge).

Manovich played a key part in creating three new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), and cultural analytics (2007-). He is the author and editor of 15 books including Cultural Analytics (2020), AI Aesthetics (2018), Theories of Software Culture (2017), Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017), Software Takes Command, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Black Box – White Cube (Merve Verlag Berlin, 2005), Soft Cinema (The MIT Press, 2005), The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), Metamediji (Belgrade, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as 180 articles which have been published in 35 countries and reprinted 650 times. He is also one of the editors of Quantitative Methods in Humanities and Social Science book series (Springer).

The Language of New Media is translated into 14 languages and is used a textbook in thousands of programs around the world. According to the reviewers, this book offers “the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject”; “it places [new media] within the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” “Software Takes Command” is also widely used in teaching – it is ranked as one of the top 20 open access books appearing on class syllabi in a number of countries. According to Google Scholar, Manovich’s publications have been cited 34,900 times.

Manovich was born in Moscow where he studied fine arts, architecture, and computer programming. He moved to New York in 1981, receiving an M.A. in Visual Science and Cognitive Psychology (NYU, 1988) and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester (1993). Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984.

His digital art projects were shown in over 110 group and personal exhibitions worldwide. The lab’s projects were commissioned by MoMA, New Public Library, and Google. “Selfiecity” won Golden Award in Best Visualization Project category in the global competition in 2014; “On Broadway” received Silver Award in the same category in 2015. The places which showed his work include New York Public Library (NYPL), Google’s Zeitgeist 2014, Shanghai Art and Architecture Biennale, Chelsea Art Museum (New York), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, US), KIASMA (Helsinki, Finland), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), ICA (London, UK), and Graphic Design Museum (Breda, The Netherlands).

In 2007 Manovich founded Software Studies Initiative (renamed Cultural Analytics Lab in 2016.) The lab pioneered computational analysis and visualization of massive cultural visual datasets in the humanities. The lab’s collaborators included the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, Getty Research Institute, Austrian Film Museum, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Image, and other institutions that are interested in using its methods and software with their media collections. Since 2012 and 2016, Manovich directed a number of projects that present an analysis of 16 million Instagram images shared worldwide.

He received grants and fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (NEH), Twitter, and many other agencies.

Between 1996 and 2012, Manovich was a Professor in Visual Arts Department at University of California San Diego (UCSD) where he was teaching classes in digital art, new media theory, and digital humanities. In addition, Manovich was a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts, The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Amsterdam, Stockholm University, University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Hong Kong Art Center, University of Siegen, Gothenburg School of Art, Goldsmiths College at the University of London, De Montfort University in Leicester, the University of New South Wales in Sydney, The University of Tyumen, Tel Aviv University and Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Shanghai. Between 2009 and 2017, he was a faculty at European Graduate School (EGS). He was also the core faculty member at The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design, Moscow (2016-2019) and a visiting faculty in School of Cultural Studies and Philosophy, Higher School of Economics, (Moscow, Russia (2020 – 2021).

Manovich is in demand to lecture on his research topics around the world. Since 1999 he presented over 700 invited lectures, keynotes, seminars, and master classes in North and South America, Asia, and Europe.

Symposium Participants

Matias del Campo

Matias del Campo is a registered architect, designer, and educator. He is an Associate Professor at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, director of the AR2IL – The Architecture and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at UoM, and an affiliate faculty member of Michigan Robotics, Computer Science, and Data Science. Matias del Campo is the co-founder of the architecture practice SPAN. The practice gained wide recognition for the design of the Austrian Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and more recently, for the Robot Garden at the Ford Robotics Building. SPAN’s work was featured in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 and 2021, at ArchiLab 2013, and the Architecture Biennale in Vienna and Buenos Aires in 2019. Solo shows include ‘Formations’ (MAK, Vienna) and ‘Sublime Bodies’ (Fab Union, Shanghai). SPAN’s work is in the permanent collection of the FRAC, the MAK, the Benetton Collection, the Albertina, the Pinakothek Munich, and several private collections.

His publishing work includes two editions of AD – Evoking through Design and Machine Hallucinations (co-edited with Neil Leach) as well as the books Neural Architecture – Design and Artificial Intelligence (ORO Editions 2022) and Sublime Bodies (co-authored with Sandra Manninger, Tongji Press 2017)

Phillip Bernstein

Phil Bernstein is an Associate Dean and Professor, Adjunct at the Yale School of Architecture, where he has taught courses in professional practice, project delivery, and technology since 1988. He was formerly a Vice President at Autodesk, where he was responsible for setting the company’s future vision and strategy for AEC technology and sustaining the firm’s relationships with strategic industry leaders. Prior to joining Autodesk, Phil practiced architecture as an associate principal at Cesar Pelli & Associates (now Pelli Clarke + Partners) where he managed many of the firm’s most complex commissions including projects for Reagan National Airport, the Mayo Clinic, and Goldman Sachs. He writes extensively on issues of architectural practice and technology, and his books include Architecture | Design | Data – Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (Birkhauser, 2018) and Machine Design: Architectural Futures in the Era of Artificial Intelligence (RIBA, 2022). Phil has been honored twice by DesignIntelligence as one of the “30 Most Admired Educators in Architecture” and was named as an Outstanding Industry Contributor by the Connecticut Construction Institute. He received a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude with Distinction in Architecture from Yale University and a Master of Architecture also from Yale. He is licensed to practice in California.

Daniel Bolojan

Daniel Bolojan is an Assistant Professor focusing on the application of computational design and deep learning strategies in architecture and architectural design process. Over the years, he has taught several design studios and seminars at the Institute of Structure and Design-University of Innsbruck, Florida International University Miami and conducted numerous international workshops and conference workshops, dealing with the application of complex systems and Neural Networks in architectural design.

He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Institute of Architecture, Vienna – Austria. Daniel received his B.Arch. and Master’s Degree in Architecture from the University of Applied Arts, Institute of Architecture, Vienna – Austria, where he studied under the late architect Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher at the Zaha Hadid Vienna Studio. He later joined the research project “Agent-Based Parametric Semiology” (Research Grant Funding- PEEK – FWF. Der Wissenshaftsfonds) as Research Fellow under the supervision of Lead Researcher: Patrik Schumacher. The research explores agent-based systems as agent-based life process simulations (architectural crowds) in order to operationalize the semantic layer within the design process, where the semiological code is defined in terms of the agent’s behavioral rules when interacting with a variety of spatial features.

In 2013, he founded his own research studio Nonstandardstudio. Over the years, through Nonstandardstudio’s work, Daniel’s design research developed at the intersection of generative design, computation, multi-agent systems, neural networks, and machine learning. The studio focuses on generative design strategies and algorithmic techniques that target the creation of highly complex autopoietic systems that could offer new opportunities for the architectural organization, articulation, and signification. These strategies emerge from growth processes, rule-based, multi-agent systems and bottom-up driven design.

Upon graduation, Daniel joined the internationally renowned architecture office CoopHimmelblau, Vienna – Austria, as Computational Designer. There he had the opportunity to practice on numerous internationally renowned projects and competitions. Shortly after joining CoopHimmelblau, Daniel held the position of Junior Associate, Computational Design Specialist & Founder and Head of Chbl|Code. As Head of Chbl|Code, he held the leading role of developing custom computational design tools (e.g. standalone apps, plugins, and add-ons), computational design strategies, virtual and augmented reality applications, machine learning, and neural networks applications, as well as robotic fabrication processes. He is responsible for the office’s current drive to develop deep learning strategies aimed at the augmentation of the designer’s native abilities through the development of the DeepHimmelblau Neural Network.

Sophia Brueckner

Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist/designer/engineer who researches how technology shapes us. Inseparable from computers since the age of two, she believes she is a cyborg. As a software engineer at Google, she designed and built products used by tens of millions. At the Rhode Island School of Design and the MIT Media Lab, she researched the simultaneously empowering and controlling aspects of technology with a focus on tangible and social interfaces.

Since 2011, Brueckner has taught Sci-Fi Prototyping, a course combining science fiction, extrapolative thinking, building prototypes, and technology ethics at MIT, Harvard, RISD, Brown, and the University of Michigan. Both the class itself as well as the students’ individual projects received international recognition and were featured by The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Wired, NPR, Scientific American, Fast Company, and many others.

Creating new ways to apply science fiction to the design process, Brueckner prototypes alternatives to the tech industry’s limited visions for how we live with technology. She makes both physical and digital artifacts combining software programming, digital fabrication, and electronics with traditional media. These projects challenge the norms of the tech community, whose work has enormous impact on our day-to-day lives, as well as translates the problems in ways that are understandable to the everyday user. She invites others to embody an attitude of “critical optimism” and to imagine what technological futures they might prefer for themselves.

Brueckner is the founder and creative director of Tomorrownaut, a creative studio focusing on speculative futures and sci-fi-inspired prototypes. Brueckner’s work has been featured by Artforum, SIGGRAPH, the Peabody Essex Museum, Portugal’s National Museum of Contemporary Art, Leonardo, Eyeo, ISEA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and more. She was an artist-in-residence at Autodesk Pier 9 and Nokia Bell Labs E.A.T. She is currently an associate professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design and co-director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) at the University of Michigan. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with the perspective of an artist to inspire a more positive future.

Benjamin Ennemoser

Benjamin Ennemoser is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and has previously taught and lectured at UCLA, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has received several fellowships and grants, including the research grant from the Academy of Performing and Visual Arts at TAMU and the Start Grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture. His research on computational design, digital fabrication, robotics, and artificial intelligence in architecture was published and presented in international journals, books, conferences, and academic institutions such as the AA London, Bartlett UCL, Tongji University, EPFL, and NJIT. He is a licensed architect in the European Union and founded his practice in 2016. He recently collaborated with Google R&D for the Built Environment, Carvana, and Gensler DxD as a technology consultant and design lead.

Catherine Griffiths

Catherine Griffiths is an artist, designer, and researcher. By creating simulations, film installations, and critical software pieces, her creative research practice attempts to make palpable invisible computational forces that shape power and structure social systems. Her current research investigates the relationship between the ethics of machine learning, labor relations, and the future of work through the lens of worker activity recognition algorithms. Her work is driven by how the spatial, sensorial, and conceptual can produce new vocabularies in thinking and feeling to make the objects of politics felt.

Her research has been exhibited in the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and published in the Journal of Digital Culture and Society and in Prospectives Journal of the Bartlett School of Architecture. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice from the University of Southern California. Today, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan with a joint appointment between Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Digital Studies Institute

Chad Jenkins

Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Ph.D., is a Professor of Robotics at the University of Michigan. Prof. Jenkins earned his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Alma College (1996), M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (1998), and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (2003). He previously served on the faculty of Brown University in Computer Science (2004-15). His research addresses problems in interactive robotics and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on mobile manipulation, robot perception, and robot learning from demonstration. His research often intersects topics in computer vision, machine learning, and computer animation. Prof. Jenkins has been recognized as a Sloan Research Fellow and is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). His work has also been supported by Young Investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Prof. Jenkins is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is an alumnus of the Defense Science Study Group (2018-19).

Immanuel Koh

Immanuel Koh, one of the key pioneering figures in the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence and Architecture, holds a joint assistant professorship in Architecture & Sustainable Design (ASD) and Design & Artificial Intelligence (DAI) at the Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD). A co-founder of the avant-garde collective Neural Architecture Group (NAG) and co-curator of AIArchitects.org, he was appointed as the Hokkien Foundation Career Chair Professor in 2021 for his trans-disciplinary research.

Immanuel obtained his PhD from the School of Computer Sciences and Institute of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and was nominated for the Best Thesis Prize and twice shortlisted for the 1 Mio Euro Lopez-Loreta Prize with his dissertation titled Architectural Sampling: A Formal Basis for Machine-Learnable Architecture (2019). His recent work has won the Golden Pin Design Award and nominated for the SAIL Award (Superior AI Leader Award) and Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year (Art and Science). He has exhibited internationally at NeurIPS’ AI & Art Gallery, Venice Architecture Biennale, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Shanghai’s 3D Printing Museum, Singapore’s ArtsHouse, Sydney’s Jones St Gallery, and Taipei’s Tittot Glass Art Museum; and featured in Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects (2022) and Neural Architecture: Architecture and Artificial Intelligence (2022).

Immanuel is the author of the book Artificial & Architectural Intelligence in Design (2020) — a first to reflect on the epistemological implications of AI on architecture, and vice versa. He also serves in the editorial and review committees of the new journal Architectural Intelligence, DigitalFUTURES, Design Computing & Cognition (DCC), Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), and Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), Design Science Journal, and Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (AMPS). His recent writings can be found in the 2022 book chapter contributions in Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice, AD (Machine Hallucination: Architecture and Artificial Intelligence), and Transformations (Artificial Creativity). His papers have been published in CAAD Futures, SIGraDi, CAADRIA , DCC and FMA, and in premium AI conferences such as International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).

A graduate from the Architectural Association (AA) London, Immanuel has taught at the AA, Royal College of Art (London), Tsinghua University (Beijing), Strelka (Moscow), Angewandte (Vienna), DIA (Bauhaus Dessau), Harvard GSD, UCL Bartlett and many others worldwide. Immanuel has also practiced as an architect at Zaha Hadid Architects (London), as a programmer at ARUP with Relational Urbanism (London), and as a creative coder at Convergeo (Lausanne) and anOtherArchitect (Berlin). He serves as an expert consultant at the new ZJU-BOSIDENG Joint Research Center on AI Design (Zhejiang), a fellow at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and a member of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA).

Immanuel now directs Artificial-Architecture which explores the techniques of the artificial, but also its societal implications through the expanded lens of the architectural. His funded research projects have been supported by agencies such as, DesignSingapore Council(DSG), AI Singapore(AISG), Urban Redevelopment Authority(URA), Building Construction Authority(BCA), Ministry of National Development(MND), Ministry of Defence(MINDEF), National Supercomputing Centre Singapore(NSCC), and several other private organisations and tech companies.

Dr. Sandra Manninger

Sandra Manninger is an architect, researcher, and educator. She is Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology. Born and educated in Austria, she co-founded SPAN Architecture together with Matias del Campo in 2003.

SPAN Architecture’s research highlights how to go beyond beautiful data to discover something that could be defined voluptuous data. This coagulation of numbers, algorithms, procedures, and programs uses the forces of thriving nature and, passing through the calculation of multi-core processors, knits them with human desire.

Her award-winning projects have been published and exhibited internationally, for example, at La Biennale di Venezia 14/16/18/21, the MAK, the Autodesk Pier 1 and have been included in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre-Val de Loire, The Design Museum/Die Neue Sammlung in Munich, or the Albertina in Vienna.

Sandra Manninger has taught internationally at, among others, the IAAC and ESARQ in Barcelona, TU Vienna, the University for Applied Arts, the Bauhaus in Dessau, at Penn Design in Philadelphia, at Tongji University, Tsinghua University, Taubman College, at the University of Michigan, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Architecture, before joining NYIT.

Kyle Steinfeld

Kyle Steinfeld makes, writes, and teaches about computational design as a cultural practice. An Associate Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley, Kyle aims to reveal the overlooked capacities of architectural computation through related practices of creative work, scholarly writing, and digital tool-making. Across these media, his work undermines the imperative voice so often bestowed upon semi-autonomous processes, and seeks to set in its place a plurality of alternative voices.

His creative work applies techniques drawn from artificial intelligence to architectural design, and has been exhibited at the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, at the NeurIPS workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, and has been written about broadly.

In his scholarly writing, he seeks to illuminate the dynamic relationship between the creative practice of design and computational design methods, thereby enabling a more inventive, informed, responsive, and responsible practice of architecture. He authored the first chapter of The Routledge Companion to Artificial Intelligence in Architecture, and is an author of “Geometric Computation: Foundations for Design”, a foundational text that demystifies computational geometry for an audience of architecture students and design professionals.

As an educator, Kyle has instructed core courses in design, architectural representation, and design computation for more than twenty years. His leadership roles in the College of Environmental Design have included serving as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, and as the Associate Director of the Master of Design program.

As a professional architect, Kyle worked with a number of design firms, including Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Acconci Studio, Kohn Petersen Fox Associates, Howler/Yoon, Diller Scofidio Renfro, and TEN Arquitectos. Kyle holds a Masters of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Bachelor’s Degree in Design from the University of Florida (UF).

He is a Fellow at Stochastic Labs, an Autodesk IDEAs fellow, and a Hellman Fellow.