Tivon Rice presents "Pattern Language 2-253" at the DXARTS Gallery

The DXARTS Gallery at McMahon 8

University of Washington

4200 Little Canoe Channel NE

Seattle, WA 98195

Point clouds, wireframes, simulations, procedurally rendered forms.

How do screen-based and algorithmic design technologies affect our
experiences and engagement with physical spaces, often in unseen ways?

How have our psychological and somatic encounters with real-world
environments and architectures shifted – subtly or overtly – now that
these spaces are so thoroughly surveyed, surveilled, designed, and devised
in virtual domains?

How has the onset of artificial intelligence accelerated these affects, as
generative and parametric design straddle the line between a dream of
enhanced creativity and a nightmare of monotonous uniformity.

A nightmare of generative reality. Endless banal sameness.

Pattern Language 2-253 critically examines these questions and evolving
relationships, probing the potentials and limitations of language in
describing the intersections of physical and virtual spaces.

The project’s micronarratives draw inspiration from the 253 chapters
of Christopher Alexander’s 1977 text, A Pattern Language. Starting with
investigations of large rural landscapes and progressively zooming into
cities, neighborhoods, streets, and individual architectures, these patterns
create a kind of prototypical hypertext, suggesting combinations of
multiple socio-spatial forms and relationships.

Rather than updating Alexander’s original text, this project imagines 253
new, near-future patterns by creating a matrix of relationships between
increasingly specific spaces and various descriptive voices – paranoid,
surreal, speculative, and science fictional, among others. These textual
provocations are generated by a natural language processing system
trained on massive amounts of available internet data, combined with
content from A Pattern Language itself. Thus, the project further explores
contemporary post-digital paradigms in which not only spatial design,
but indeed language, memory, imagination, and creativity are bound up
in a complex of human and machine co-production.

Pattern Language 2-253 is made possible with the generous support of
The University of Washington’s Department of Digital Arts and
Experimental Media, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in
the Fine Arts, The Kreielsheimer Arts Endowment at the University of
Washington, and The 2024 Bumbershoot Arts & Music Festival.