“Agency of Designer in the Age of AI”
Exhibition proposal for DesignTO 2023


 
Compilation of Student Films in Our AI Workshop


Intro


Collaborating with DesignTO, the largest annual design festival in Canada, this exhibition is part of the events will be held in Toronto during Toronto Design Week 2024.


The exhibition will display our student works in a format of a film compilation and virtual Reality (VR). The student works were produced this summer through a global online workshop organised by a digital laerning platform "DigitalFuture World". In addition to student showcase, the exhibition will also display curators' current research projects about AI and film making, in the medium of animation and film.


The opening ceremony will be a public discussion between invited guests around the globe, such as AA School of Architecture and MIT, both online and in person.




Venue
The format of the exhibition will be a pop-up booth that features a physical VR space, where visitors can visit the digital exhibition through a VR headset installed in the venue. Besides, the digital contents will also be shown on the screens installed in the venue.


Schedule
Opening Ceremony : 15 Jan 2024, in person, University of Toronto
Online Exhibition: 15 -28 Jan 2024, Online
Physical Pop-up Booth : 15 -28 Jan 2024, in person, University of Toronto


Theme
AI has flooded the media spectrum with indiscernible imagery that creates our simulated reality. Many of our understanding of the world is constructed based on visual understanding and design industry is already indisputably visually driven profession.


However, AI ethics has become a public concern and therefore for designer, image making is the building block of that alternative reality. Therefore, we seek to question the agency of machine and designer in the age of artificial intelligence, through the lenses of a series of outputs from our student works.




Schedule
Location : 333 Denison St Unit 1, Markham, ON L3R 2Z4, Canada ( San Sheng Art Space Showroom )
Opening Ceremony : 22 Jan 2024, in person
Time : 22 Jan, 2024 (10am - 8pm) ; 23 - 28 Jan, 2024 (10am - 6pm)
Online Exhibition: 15 -28 Jan 2024, Online




About the Designers

Peggy (Peiyao) Yu is a media artist and architectural designer. She studied at Architectural Association Diploma. Recently, she won the Young Architect Competition “Dream Villas – YAC”. She is also the winner of the RIBA’s “Future City – Metaverse Festival 2022”. She was a previous researcher and a juror at workshops organised at Tongji University, Shanghai. She has various experiences from built installations, including digital fabrication and interactive narrative performances, ranging from physical installation and robotics to media art.


Tom Chan holds a Master of Architecture (AA Diploma) at the AA School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. He currently works in Foster + Partners in the UK and has worked in Peter Cook Architects as a visualiser. His works were published by AArchitecture Magazine in London and exhibited in Barcelona Design Week in Spain.


Exhibit Content


  • Film Screening (VR / TV Screen):
    • Fake Authenticity / Film / 2023 / Peggy Yu
    • Simulacra's Gaze / Film / 2023 / Peggy Yu
    • Gall-E / Film / 2023 / Tom Chan
    • Latent Object! 404 gLitch? / Film / 2023 / DigitalFuture Students


Exhibition Coordinator

Sherry Chunqing Liu is a curator, writer, designer, artist, and educator based in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. She holds an Honors Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto. Her curatorial projects have been exhibited at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Jackman Humanities Institute, and the University of Toronto Exam Centre among others.


Previous Workshop / Festival



- 2023 Digital Future Workshop


Drawing 01.   Latent Object! 404 gLitch? / Film / 2023 / DigitalFuture Students Selected student works,including 6 stories that speculate future cities.






                         

Drawing 02. Gall-E / Film / 2023 / Tom Chan







Drawing 03. Simulacra's Gaze / Film / 2023 / Peggy Yu