AI... To Be Determined
Exhibition Curated by Julie Kress and Mark Stanley

Shelby Doyle, Andrew Kudless, and Curry Hackett

University of Tennesee-Knoxville  
Fall 2023

/imagine digital feminist architecture history computation

This project began as a method to grapple with absence in the digital architectural archive of datasets never recorded and stories left untold.  Whose work is deemed worthy of record and the resulting access to data record is very much a form of power and perhaps even more importantly – a way to control access to forms of knowledge in the design fields and beyond. In that - if we copy and paste an  idea – even one rooted in data - enough times does it eventually become mistaken for the truth – or more insidiously do promises of transparency mask opacity?  The data sets, metadata, and data labeling that underpin the rapid proliferation of AI, I think, can all be considered forms of archives that simultaneously draw from the past, operate upon the present and become future records. Because of this simultaneity I’ve been thinking a great deal about this quote from Benjamin Bratton: That an archive is a promise to the future that the present will make itself accountable.  What data practices do we use today to be accountable to our future? What would it mean to have an intersectional archive? How do we include embodied knowledge or what James Bridle terms the un-computable? How then does our architectural archive deal with future histories not written at all, archives not created, and stories left untold - by consent or otherwise.