When Architects Love Robots Too Much

"When entering the Corderie dell'Arsenale, the main exhibition space of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, it would be easy to mistake what's on view for the Consumer Electronics Show. The halls are filled with glowing LCD screens, robots, 3-D-printed installations, renderings of blobby, oozing buildings accompanied by jargon-filled texts, and interactive gimmicks. But much of it feels oddly familiar, artifacts from an earlier era of technological optimism."

"Among the CES-lite installations, there was Philip F. Yuan and Bin He's "Co-Poiesis," in which Boston Dynamics robots play instruments and dance under a canopy made of wood recovered from trees felled by the Beibiya typhoon in Shanghai. What's intended as a display of "environmental adaptation" lands as an unintentionally apocalyptic scene from a future where climate-change-induced disaster can offer us building materials, even if no one is left to live in it."

"Takashi Ikegami and Luc Steels's "Am I a Strange Loop?" features a humanoid robot that takes audience questions in an attempt to persuade the crowd that it is self-aware. Someone asked, "Are you feeling anything right now?" Its answer, along the lines of "I am a robot, though it may look like I have feelings," was a non-statement if there ever was one, though the crowds didn't seem to get tired of the spectacle."

Entering the Corderie dell'Arsenale evokes a Consumer Electronics Show, with halls filled with glowing screens, robots, 3-D-printed installations, blobby renderings, jargon-filled texts, and interactive gimmicks. Over 750 participants crowd the space, many first-time exhibitors. Philip F. Yuan and Bin He's Co-Poiesis stages Boston Dynamics robots playing instruments beneath a canopy of wood recovered from trees felled by the Beibiya typhoon, suggesting an apocalyptic recycling of disaster. Takashi Ikegami and Luc Steels's humanoid robot solicits audience questions while offering evasive answers about feeling. Many exhibits display rudimentary algorithmic learning more suited to start-up beta testing than critical architectural experimentation.

Read at Curbed