Aidan Meller and his AI-powered creation Ai-Da are exhibiting what they believe to be the first building concept designed by a humanoid robot, currently on display at Denmark’s Utzon Center.
Completed in 2019, Ai-Da is an artificial intelligence-driven machine with a realistic human-like face, a robot arm used for drawing and moving cameras for eyes that enable it to “see”.
The robot artist, whose body of work has been displayed at London’s V&A Museum, the Venice Biennale and the Great Pyramid of Giza, produced the new building concept for the Utzon Center exhibition I’m not a robot: Architecture and Design Between Human and Machine.
The building Ai-Da has imagined is a retro-futuristic pod house in the vein of Matti Suuronen’s space-age Futuro House, with bulbous curves and giant porthole windows.
It was designed to support human and robot cohabitation and, according to Ai-Da, could be used on the moon or Mars as well as on Earth.
The robot’s work on the house spans multiple mediums, including a rough pen sketch and detailed paintings produced using her robot arm, as well as digital renders of the exterior and interior.
These seem to show a house that has two living rooms, a spiral staircase, a kitchenette or bathroom, and a miniature pod contained within the larger one, presumably for the robot to sleep in.
Meller is elusive about where the line between human prompting and AI agency lies within Ai-Da’s work, saying on the project’s website that, like many successful contemporary artists, Ai-Da has a team of “studio technicians”.
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