Pareidolia. Vie, piazze e monumenti di Roma
Open House with Artists & Round Table on the Occasion of the Exhibition Opening
- Open House Exhibiton: on-site visit possible upon registration / Round table will be streamed live
- Beginn: 08.10.2020 17:00
- Ende: 10.10.2020 13:00
- Vortragende(r): Open House with Artists & Round table
- Ort: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rom
- Kontakt: freiberg@biblhertz.it

A corpus of architectural drawings featured in Giacomo Antonelli’s volume Vie, piazze e monumenti di Roma (1835), recently digitized from the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s holdings, is turned into a dataset for a “self-learning” neural network designed by Ernst and Losert. After a training process, their software generates drawings translated from algorithmically derived cityscapes. Besides transposing the nineteenth-century visual input into a computational output, Ernst and Losert’s network iteratively produces new rules for its progressive calculations. It thereby accentuates and re-invents, in dream-like visualizations, canonical design elements, relationships and proportions. Machinic pareidolia—the flickering projection of learned patterns—is here employed to test out the potential for variance contained in the scripts of a long influential architectural style, as they undergo contingent, individual interpretation.
Showcased at the
Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Sala degli specchi are the rare books on
architecture that the software was trained on, as well as visualizations that span
across different media and formats. These visualizations provide insights into
the algorithmic processuality itself—generally opaque to nonspecialist
observers—and into its outcomes. With this constellation of exhibits, Pareidolia
seeks to draw attention, more broadly, to the potentials and limitations of
the use of artificial intelligence in artistic and architectural practice. What
type of expertise does the inventive potency of algorithmic writing presume,
and how do its pragmatics and aesthetics generate new knowledge in turn? What
meaningful ways of engagement with the past can a combined human and machinic
authorship perform, as it re-activates archival materials without losing sight
of ever-recurring historical, social, and technical biases?
Sebastian Felix Ernst is a Berlin-based architect and lecturer. His projects blur the boundaries of aesthetic, architectural, and academic research. He has executed full-scale building projects as well as commissioned installations and exhibition displays. Currently he teaches a design studio at Dessau International Architecture Graduate School and is involved in multiple interdisciplinary projects with his practice ERNST-office for architecture. In 2019 he was a fellow at Villa Massimo in Rome. He will soon be participating in the group exhibition "Piranesi oggi" opening at Casa di Goethe in Rome on October 16.
Christian Losert is a Berlin-based artist,
lecturer, and creative technologist in the field of media arts. He works at the
intersection of art, design, and contemporary technology. His current practice
focuses on self-unfolding installations controlled via computational methods.
In his recent works, he incorporates custom-built artificial neural networks as
a leading motive of his compositorial contributions.
The exhibition is co-organized with the support of Accademia tedesca Roma Villa Massimo.
October 8, 17:00-18:00
On the occasion of the
exhibition opening, a diverse group of speakers will convene for a round table to
discuss Ernst and Losert’s in situ and practice-based approach to the
Bibliotheca Hertziana’s holdings: Sebastian Felix Ernst, Sietske Fransen,
Christian Losert, Darío
Negueruela del Castillo, Marie Theres Stauffer, and Maria Bremer.
This event will be
streamed live on our streaming channel.
October 9-10
Registration for the visits Open House with Artists
October 9
15:00-16:00: please register HERE
17:00-18:00: please register HERE
October 10
10:00-11:00: please register HERE
12:00-13:00: please register HERE
Scientific organization: Maria Bremer