Meet the jury: Archinect's Generative Futures AI Storytelling Challenge

Archinect, Bustler's sister site, is introducing the stellar panel of jurors for our Generative Futures: An AI + Architecture Storytelling Challenge.

The competition prompts participants to envision a future combining text and images, exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and architecture. We invite architects, designers, students, and storytellers to dream up, reflect on, investigate, or critique our future reality (or unreality) in a rapidly changing world using AI-driven text-to-image tools for graphics, and text generation tools for words and scripts

The brief welcomes story submissions along one of the four themes: the AI-infused city, the AI-infused architecture studio, the AI-infused construction site, or, if your imagination lives beyond convention, define your own theme in our Open Category as your story relates to AI and architecture.

For this special challenge, we are proud to announce six leading figures from the world of architecture, design, entertainment, visual arts, architectural technology, and film to serve as our judging panel.

Come, and meet the jury:

Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is also a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. His work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Refik’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audiovisual performances, and environmental installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, decentralized networks, collective experience, and the creative potential of machines. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica Festival, Istanbul Design Biennial, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media. In 2018, Refik Anadol collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for WDCH Dreams, a live audio-visual performance projected on the façade of Frank Gehry’s iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in celebration of the orchestra’s centennial. “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised,” his first solo North American museum presentation, is currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Michael Begler

Michael Begler has been a working writer in Hollywood for several decades. His resume spans from sitcoms to features to prestige television dramas. He is probably best known for being a co-creator on the award-winning television series “The Knick,” directed by Steven Soderbergh. Michael is currently acting as showrunner and executive producer of the second season of HBO’s critically acclaimed “Perry Mason.”

Kordae Henry

Kordae Jatafa Henry is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and visual artist. The core of his practice stems from a multidisciplinary background, having earned a dual Master of Architecture/Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in 2015, as well as a Master of Arts in SCI-Arc’s postgraduate Fiction and Entertainment program in 2018. His release of his 2019 short music film “Earth Mother, Sky Father” has led him to take the stage at the 2019 Design Indaba Conference, become a recent nominee for the Shots 2020 Awards’ New Director of the Year, and exhibit his work in museums and festivals all over the world. Through live-action music films, installations, dance, game engine environments, and mythology, Henry’s work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, pop culture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination. Most recently, Henry has worked with Sundance New Frontier Lab and ONX Studio to reconstruct a real-time performance exploring the past, present, and future of the Black body through ceremony. He is currently Visual Studies faculty at SCI-Arc.

Laure Michelon

Laure Michelon is an architectural technologist and designer with a focus in architecture, machine learning, energy analysis, and fashion. Her research and practice focus on digital simulation and algorithmic mutations with focused interests in infrastructure systems, machine learning, and fashion. Currently a lecturer at UCLA AUD Technologies Studio, she previously taught at SCI-Arc, was a Project Designer at Ishida Rehm Studio, where she worked on projects such as the Architectural Beast, Hoax Urbanism, and New Campo Marzio, a Creative Technologist at Actual Objects, and an Energy Analyst at Glumac. Laure has an M.S. in Architectural Technologies from SCI-Arc and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Columbia University SEAS.

Sandra Manninger

Sandra Manninger is an architect, researcher, and educator. She is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. Born and educated in Austria, she co-founded SPAN Architecture together with Matias del Campo in 2003. Her award-winning projects have been published and exhibited internationally, for example, at La Biennale di Venezia 14/16/18/21/23, the MAK, the Autodesk Pier 1 and have been included in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre-Val de Loire, The Design Museum/Die Neue Sammlung in Munich, or the Albertina in Vienna. Sandra has taught internationally at, among others, the IAAC and ESARQ in Barcelona, TU Vienna, the University for Applied Arts, the Bauhaus in Dessau, at Penn Design in Philadelphia, at Tongji University, Tsinghua University, Taubman College, at the University of Michigan, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Architecture, before joining NYIT.

René Peralta

René Peralta studied Architecture at the New School of Architecture in San Diego and the Architectural Association in London, England. He has a Master of Science in Planning with an emphasis in History and Theory from the University of Oklahoma. Peralta is a co-author with Fiamma Montezemolo and Heriberto Yepez of the book “Here is Tijuana,” Black Dog Publishing, London 2006. He co-edited, along with Tito Alegría and Roger Lewis, the commemorative edition of the book “A Temporary Paradise: A Look at the San Diego Region's special landscape,” published by COLEF in 2018 and initially prepared by Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard in 1974. He is the author of the soon-to-be-published short story Border Astronaut which utilizes AI as a method and medium to explore the future US/Mexico border region through a surreal and dreamlike lens. The story challenges conventional ideas of urbanism and architecture while emphasizing the emotional impact of physical barriers and the resilience of those who traverse them. By blurring the lines between reality and dreams and incorporating AI-generated content, the narrative invites viewers to contemplate the potential for reimagining border spaces' design, function, and symbolism more humanely and inclusively.

The challenge is open and accepting submissions until Monday, June 12th. Competition results will be announced on June 30th on Archinect and here on Bustler.

For more information, head to the competition brief on Bustler. Submit your story today!

This competition is part of the Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series.