TEACHING
Generative Renders: Using AI to Construct Synthetic Architectural Representation
[ UCLA AUD Technology Seminar Fall Quarter 2023 ]
The quarter-long project will focus on leveraging a variety of neural networks including Stable Diffusion, LoRA models, ControlNet, and Pix2Pix, to generate, alter, edit, and manipulate the representation of a simple screenshot taken from Rhino. Using a combination of softwares students will produce detailed rendered images and/or video of a simple Rhino massing. These renders might include facade, aerial, full, interior, medium, close, or extremely close shots. Students will research, test, and manipulate the inputs and versions of the models as well as use a variety of control techniques to produce the desired output. Each student will aim to control, edit, and understand, the workflow of editing and generating each layer of the produced image.
ProxyFaces: Masks, Manipulation, and Machine Vision
[ UCLA AUD Technology Seminar Spring Quarter 2023 ]
This course will investigate the classification machine learning models, as
well as explore a variety of mask making techniques that might help us to
embrace, distort, or hide from the classification. The masks or “proxy faces” serve as a type of tool or prosthetic through which the user could disrupt their classification originally deemed by the model.
VIMEO LINK 01 VIMEO LINK 02
Proximity Living: Using VR and Digital Twins to Maintain Complex Infrastructure Systems
[ UCLA MSAUD IDEAS Technology Seminar Winter Quarter 2023 ]
This course explores the concept of designing or re-imagining the architectural home in which we live in close proximity to decentralized infrastructure systems such as algae, carbon capture, and wastewater treatment. Through this course, students learned how to design and integrate these systems into the architecture of the home, design the UIUX maintenance infrastructure needed to operate the system using VR, and then represented it using a combination of VR and projection mapping. They were also introduced to the various types of infrastructure systems, how they work, their benefits and their drawbacks
VIMEO LINK
FINDING PLANET B: Speculations on Exoplanetary Life
[ UCLA MSAUD IDEAS Technology Seminar Fall Quarter 2022 ]
Observations from both the ground and from space have confirmed thousands of planets beyond our solar system. Our galaxy likely holds trillions. But so far, we have no evidence of life beyond Earth. Is life in the cosmos easily begun, and commonplace? Or is it incredibly rare? By speculating on and designing for possible future habitable planets we can turn our gaze inward into what makes a habitable planet. In this course seven groups are speculating on exo-planetary life using examples from NASA’s ‘Eyes on Exoplanets’. Students are primarily using Houdini and Unreal Engine.[ GJ 1132 b Miao Hu, Aili Hu] [AU Microscopii b Berhan Uludag, Manan Vikam, Nethraa SK]
VIMEO LINK
Digital Embodiment: Making Your Metaverse Avatar
[ UCLA MSAUD IDEAS Technology Studio Summer Quarter 2022 ]
How have our digital visual systems transformed our perceptions of human beings and society?
Has this digital world opened a new means for self-extension, self-representation, and self-archiving?
Identities and personhood are artificially assembled, morphed, and multiplied as data from digital interactions is processed and aggregated into alternative realities throughout server farms across the globe. All users are left with is fiction, a sort of mimetic reflection of our amazon purchases, Instagram stories, yelp reviews, and guided meditation videos. In this course, we will study and test the minimum amount of data, representation, and objectification you need to generate a decent archive of your current self. By creating avatars that mimic and reflect aspects of our personality while representing our corporeal form we seek to provide an opportunity for a broader consideration of and reflection on our digital footprint, data, and representation.
VIMEO LINK
MAXIMUM CITY
[ UCLA MSAUD IDEAS Technology Studio Studio 2021 - 2022 ]The studio “Maximum City” aims to imagine and define the goals, design features and atmospheres of such new cities as technological inventions envisioned to meet the needs of early 21st century life; one that is able to fulfill the immense demands of industrial production as it relates to economy, technology, culture and ecology while providing a sustainable model to halt and reverse the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Ultimately defining the city as an artificial environment for human occupation, the “Maximum City” studio will envision and embrace a research-based, optimistic and technocratic urban design agenda where planetary scale economic, technological, cultural and ecological problems are diagnosed as case studies and operational scenarios of cohesive urban morphologies are proposed in order to challenge the ad-hoc nature of urban growth and occupation.
Morphi - Terraforming Western Australia
( Sanya Vithalkar, Srujana Bhoopanam, Danai Sougkara )
Video Link
TERRAFORMING THE CUYAHOGA RIVER
[ Kent State CAED Summer Graduate Studio 2022 ]
Chinampification
(Davor, Caleb)
THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
[ UCLA MSAUD IDEAS Technology Seminar 2022 ]NEW YEAR
(Junjie Fang, Yuntao Gao, Ting Su, Yunchen Tian,
Yuang Li)
Micro Scale Algae Farming
(Sarah, Diane)
CORGI VISION (Daaa Zhao, Landy Niu, Maggie Jiang, Yafen Li)
