Doctoral candidate Jose Luis García del Castillo will be co-teaching the “Talk to a Wall” workshop at the forthcoming ACADIA 2018 conference in Mexico City.

This workshop will be a collaborative design exercise which seeks to explore new pluralities on the intersubjectivities of human and machine within the context of architectural design methods. Participants will train a neural network (LSTM) by procedurally sketching architectural ideas, they will then select words and images that associate to those sketches. The network will learn from the participant drawings and do searches in a higher dimensional space to understand the associations between the semantics and their drawings. The model should then be able to draw in a similar style to that of the participant when triggered by a concept word or by an initial set of parameters. The model predictions will then be translated into robotic motion parameters to drive the kinematics of a 6-axis industrial robotic arm. Participants will gain skills in procedurally sketching methods, machine learning and robotic fabrication within a framework of bidirectional communication between both.

 The workshop will be led by Alicia Nahmad (AADRL), Vishu Bhooshan (Zaha Hadid Architects CODE), Cristobal Valenzuela (NYU, RunwayML) and Jose Luis, and will be held at the School of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) October 15-17th 2018. 

More information on: http://2018.acadia.org/workshops.html