Group Members:

Akiel Allen

Arseny Pekurovsky

Description:

In our casino design for Coney Island, we carry forward a central concept of the archive into experimentations with generative AI. Using interview transcripts from Coney Island’s online Oral History Archive, a methodology was created in which these interviews were brought into ChatGPT to be interpreted into generative image prompts for Midjoruney.

Based on the resulting series of images, we imagined a generic layout for our casino situated directly on top of Luna Park. Through the scenes produced through the placement of tables, gaming areas, tables, and shapes articulated through the tensile fabric architecture, we conceptualized distinct digital layers of reality, each unique to the worlds described by the interviewees

Through Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet tool, 360 images can be created which takes this generic form and transforms it into a memory-scape. We provided six examples of possible environments based on existing interviews, including gardens, teahouses, seashores, cityscapes, and forests.

It is important to note that these places are imaginary, and critically from the compounded misunderstandings of each generative AI model. In efforts to seem more poetic, sensible, or otherwise coherent, each tool used in the methodology had to make sense of what they were given, resulting in narrating parts of an individual’s story which are not necessarily true.

It is these misunderstandings that we believe fit well with the disorienting nature of casinos, AI models, and memory itself. We lean into these shortcomings in our design to produce spaces that are incongruous with, yet derived from, one’s surroundings.