This is a place where I share what I've been up to lately in a relatively informal and rhizomatic manner.
November 2024 > I participated in the Body Matters: Architectural Humanities 21st International Conference organized at the Norwich University of the Arts where I presented the paper: Applying a Science&Technology Studies Lens to Contemporary Architecture with Digital Humanities. I was very impressed with the quality of the research presented here and will surely return in the following years.
October 2024 > without teaching this semester I have time to focus on my design practice, as well as finishing up texts that have been piling up for a long time. The coolest thing I've been up to though is to work together with Cody Lukas on the artwork Life as Material for this exhibition https://edenonline.dk/ . We are exploring natural materials such as mycelium, kombucha and bio-concrete in a large-scale architectural sculpture to be exhibited at Kunsthal Nord (Aalborg) early December.
April 2024 > publications, conferences, and exciting things [arguably the most productive month of my career so far :)]
> together with Panagiota Pouliou and George Palamas we participated in the 29th Conference of Computer-Aided Architectural Design in Asia (CAADRIA2024) with the paper: Decisions we Should Put in the Algorithm: Mapping Architects' attitudes towards computational and AI-powered tools for practice which also won the BEST PATER AWARD . The paper can be accessed here.
> our journal article AI for Conceptual Architecture: Reflections on designing with text-to-text, text-to-image and image-to-image generators written by myself and Panagiota Pouliou has been published in Frontiers of Architectural Research. The article can be accessed here.
> our book chapter Digital Twins in Architecture: An ecology of practices and understandings is out! This is part of the Handbook of Digital Twins. The chapter can be accessed here.
> together with Viola Rühse, we participated at the Politics of the Machines (lifelikeness and beyond) conference in Aachen, presenting the paper Fungi Matters: a comparative study of mycelium imagery in art and architecture
January 2024 > we exhibited Bio-crafting Architecture: the results of a workshop on 3D printing of minimal surfaces and living materials, taught to students from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of Cluj-Napoca. The exhibition took place at Centrul de Cultură Urbană in Cluj.
October 2023 > More publications out:
the journal article STEAM matters for Sustainability: 10 Years of Art and Technology Students Research on Sustainability through Problem-based Learning written by myself, Markus Löchtefeld, Falk Heinrich, and Brian Bemman was published in the Journal of Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education, under the special issue: Weaving Hybrid Futures. The article can be found here.
the special issue titled: Weaving Hybrid Futures: Sustainability in Higher Education with PBL Through Art, Science, and Robotics together with the editorial written together with: Laura Beloff, Lykke Brogaard Bertel, Judit Boros, Lorena Sarahuja, Pia Fricker, Foad Hamidi, Martin Michael Hanczyc, Elizabeth Jochum, Markus Löchtefeld, Timothy Robert Merritt, Karina Vissonova (the ABRA consortium) is now published here.
The two outputs above are part of the project Artificial Biology, Robotics and Art.
May 2023 > the chapter Soft Robotics Workshops: Supporting Experiential Learning About Design, Movement, and Sustainability written by me, Elizabeth Jochum, Markus Löchtefeld, Karina Vissonova, Timothy Robert Merritt was published in the book: Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and Their Emergent Cultural Ecologies edited by Belinda J. Dunstan, Jeffrey T.K.V. Koh, Deborah Turnbull Tillman, Scott Andrew Brown here. This output is part of the project Artificial Biology, Robotics and Art.
April 2023 > the journal article Speculative Hybrids: Investigating the Generation of Conceptual Architectural Forms through the Use of 3D Generative Adversarial Networks by Panagiota Pouliou, myself, and George Palamas was just published in the International Journal of Architectural Computing here. This is part of the project: Architecture and Computation
March 2023 > I received a small grant from Novo Nordisk Fonden for organizing Un-disciplinary - a symposium to be held between 2-4 of May 2023 at Aalborg University. Check it here
December 2022 > Viola Rühse and myself wrote a book review about Silvia Casini's Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology. The review is called The Presence of the Absence: sensory aesthetics and Magnetic Resonance Imaging and was published in the journal The Senses and Society here.
October 2022 > I participated in the conference Questions: Building Change in Architecture organized by the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (my home university). I gave a talk called: Towards Critical Entanglements of Machine Learning Aesthetics and Architecture. It was great to be back after 10 years, reconnect with old schoolmates, and see what everyone has been up to.
August 2022 > Sonic Coexistence, an interactive installation for which I collaborated with Anders Eskildsen went to Venice and got featured here. Also, the extended abstract describing our process can be found here. This is part of the project: Sonoid.
May 2022 > I was invited to the National Film School of Denmark to give a talk about our progress on the project Reconsidering Otherness. The talk was part of a seminar investigating how filmmakers can work with data. The work I presented showed how we worked with machine learning algorithms to generate text and images for a conceptual architectural competition. This research is part of the project: Architecture and Computation.
March 2022 > I have received two small grants from the Human-Centered AI cluster at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University for two projects investigating the use of machine learning in architecture. The projects are called Reconsidering Otherness and Speculative Hybrids! and are collaborations with Johana Lauritzen and Panagiota Pouliou. We are exploring: text generation, image generation, and point cloud generation of architectures by using machine learning algorithms. This research is part of the project: Architecture and Computation.
February 2022 > Together with my colleague Anders Eskildsen from the Music and Sound Knowledge Group here at AAU, we will go to Venice to exhibit our artwork Sonic Coexistence as part of the Creativity&Cognition 2022 conference which will take place at the same time as the 59th Venice Art biennale! Links and further descriptions to follow. This research is part of the project: Sonoid.
| How we talk(ed) about it: Ways of speaking about computational architecture. 2022 [Horvath, A-S]. in International Journal of Architectural Computing. https://doi.org/10.1177/14780771211070006 is out!!!
Oct 2021 > I'm so happy that my paper investigating ways of speaking in computational architecture, based on a corpus analysis of 4.6 million words, from texts written over the last 15 years - has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Architectural Computing. This is part of the project: Architecture and Computation.
June 2021 > we took part in CHItaly with these 2 papers:
| Bringing Human Centeredness to Technologies for Buildings - An Agenda for Linking New Types of Data to the Challenge of Sustainability. [C. Vite, AS. Horvath, G. Neff, NLH. Møller] in CHItaly ‘21: Proceedings of the 14th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter. pp. 1-8. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3464385.3464711
| messyBIM: Augmenting a Building Information Model with Messy Talk to Improve a Buildings’ Design process. [AS. Horvath, C. Vite, NLH. Møller, G. Neff] in M. Menéndez-Blanco, S. Uğur Yavuz, J. Schubert, D. Fogli, & F. Paternò (Eds.) CHItaly 2021 Joint Proceedings of Interactive Experiences and Doctoral Consortium, (Vol. 2892). pp. 7-14. CEUR Workshop Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2892/paper-2.pdf
Both are part of the project: Architecture and Computation.