/imagine: A Journey into The New Virtual

In virtual space visionary designs and fictional scenarios for architecture and urban planning can be imagined without the limitations of the real world.

Design techniques such as renderings and AI algorithms are becoming ever more popular. Computational tools have not only revolutionized the design process and concept development in architecture and design, but also expanded our cultural, social, political, and aesthetic understanding of how we shape, experience, and navigate space.

The exhibition /imagine: A Journey into The New Virtual presents an overview of the many design strategies of “The New Virtual” and brings together exciting projects by international architects, designers, and artists that deal in different ways with the challenges and potentials of virtual space and the affiliated social, ecological, political, and infrastructural effects.

In four chapters—Speculative Narratives and Worldbuilding, Research Investigations, Dreamscapes, and AI and Algorithmic Variation—the exhibition features a diverse range of recent work, including a number of commissions, formulating new narratives, perspectives, and agencies in virtual space that may continue into physical reality.

/imagine: is the command that allows users to create their own architectural utopias with the open source software Midjourney. Based on a text prompt, an AI generates images that can be infinitely varied.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Featured artists include:

• Liam Young, Planet City, 2020
• Jose Sanches (Plethora Project), Common'hood, 2022 and Block'hood, 2017
• iheartblob, _Spaces, 2020
• 2MVD (Damjan Minovski, Valerie Messini), Rift, Aerial Rocks, Eddy, 2023
• Kordae Jatafa Henry, Earth Mother, Sky Father, 2019
• Mariam Hillawi Abraham, Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus, 2019
• Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, 2015/2016
• Space Popular, The Portal Galleries, 2022
• Genevieve Goffman, The View, 2023
• ZYVA Studio × Charlotte Taylor, Neo-Chemosphere, 2021
• Studio Mary Lennox, Charlotte Taylor, formundrausch, Smokebush Court, 2020
• formundrausch, No Use For A Name - Daydreamers, 2020
• Studio Precht, Bert, 2018 and The Farmhouse, since 2017
• Alexis Christodoulou, Quantum Express, 2022
• Andrés Reisinger, Hortensia, 2018
• Andrés Reisinger × Júlia Esqué × Moooi, Hortensia Chair, 2019
• Lee Pivnik, Symbiotic House, since 2022
• Leah Wulfman, My Mid Journey Trash Pile, 2022
• SPAN (Matias del Campo und Sandra Manninger), The Doghouse, 2023
• Alisa Andrasek, Ecocity, 2023
• Simone C. Niquille, HOMESCHOOL, 2019

CURATORS: Bika Rebek, Architect and Principal, Some Place Studio Marlies Wirth, Curator Digital Culture and MAK Design Collection    

EXHIBITION DESIGN: Some Place Studio 

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Process - Studio for Art and Design   

All texts and information on the exhibited works will be available on the project website from 9 May: thenewvirtual.org