2023

Type:
Video animation, visual identity, research
Lenght:
3’24” (x5)
Tools:
Stable Diffusion Web UI and Gen-2, Chat GPT 4
With:
Alex Foradori
Group Exhibition:
Turn Signals—Design is not a Dashboard
Exhibited at:
FABER, Timișoara, Romania (Capital of Culture 2023)
Full documentation:
Bright Cityscapes

‘A Lexicon of Orientation’ translates the economic and geographical data of Timișoara (Romania) into visual and linguistic formats. It draws upon the findings of a commissioned report titled 'Economy in Timișoara: Territorial Distribution of the Economy in the Timișoara Metropolitan Area.' Together with sociologist Norbert Petrovici and curator Martina Muzi, I identified five key subjects: Industrialisation and Technological Level, Workers, Commuting and Internal Migration, Import and Export, Automotive and Related Industries, and Outsourcing and IT.

From these subjects, I developed five glossaries to explain complex economic phenomena. These terms also served as prompts for the animated films generated by AI using multimodal neural networks, Stable Diffusion Web UI and Gen-2. By transforming both text prompts and visual inputs into moving images, I created five fictional landscapes that offer a visual interpretation of the report's data, highlighting the interpretive nature of data and its application beyond market-based optimisation.

'A Lexicon of Orientation' was featured in the exhibition 'Turn Signal–Design is not a Dashboard,' and also served as visual identity of the event. The exhibition marked the culmination of my year-long participation in the multidisciplinary programme 'Bright Cityscapes,’ in Romania, which focused on addressing contemporary urban challenges in design, architecture, and digital culture. During this year, I conducted research that served as the backbone of the exhibition and collaborated with curator Martina Muzi on multiple exhibition designs and productions, workshops, events, and publication creation, both online and in print.