In the era of simulated images and extended machine-interactive conversations, the question of how the imagination functions requires, ever more, disciplined theory. AI demonstrates that What You Want is not fully known or perhaps even knowable; instead, a dark mirror discloses its depths in sequences of dramatic, sometimes puzzling, sometimes surprising or even horrifying encounters. This session invites speculative engagement with Artificial Intelligence that go past the simplistic model of wishfulness to look for a new meaningful, unpredictable determinacy.
Iraj Ghoochani and Don Kunze will conduct a workshop on the tiny house at the VANDA conference, September 23–26, 2024.
The idea of the dream-house is ancient. When resources have allowed, as in the case of Nero’s Golden House, the results have proven a rule expressed in the Chinese saying, “beware of what you wish for.” Wishfulness stands in complex counterpoint to truth. Imagination does not have full access to its foundational desire. Before the early, fateful encounters with restrictions imposed by language, family, and society, the child diversified the locales and means of enjoyment in play-related, universe-building ways. Later attempts to compensate for this Paradise Lost (money, perceived status, material goods—houses in particular) prove to be unsatisfying because their quantity cannot substitute for desire’s original “ring of truth.”
Background: Ethnology offers a collective view of what happens at the psychoanalytic level, and the two must engage each other theoretically to create an effective study model. Our study takes its impetus from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, with key studies, such as Norman O. Brown’s Hermes the Thief, to model what happens in the dream-house and its tiny AI manifestations. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Map of the Bororo village Kejara presents the basic idea that every idealized spatial schema is a composite of dialectically opposed forces.
Artificial Intelligence: This session engages with Artificial Intelligence to anchor discussions that range across a number of disciplines: architecture, psychoanalysis, anthropology, philosophy, philology … The recent practice of combining the popular Tiny House idea with AI-generated images is a test of this session’s inventiveness: (1) either the imagination is able to construct a proper frame to navigate through the candy of wish-generation, or (2) it is held prisoner suspended within an “as-if ideology,” with access to the satisfactions of deep childhood always stepping just out of reach, with every attempt to recover them. For deeper study beyond this session, we recommend an updated protocol based on André Nusselder’s Interface Fantasy and Patricia Clough’s The User Unconscious. See the Bibliography.
Required: Each proposal for engaging theses architectural manifestation of wishfulness should address this question: Where should this go? Every plan should come with a map, a specification for future collaboration and conclusion, ambition with reasoned supports—the framework beneath the daring track of a roller-coaster.
For an introduction to this topic, read Amanda Hess’s New York Times article, “How AI is Remodeling the Fantasy Home,” February 4, 2024.
For an introductory consultation with ChatGPT, see “The Question of the Dream House.”
On September 26 – 29, 2022, the Vienna Anthropology Days take place at the University of Vienna. VANDA is a green, socially inclusive international conference, hosted by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. It brings together scholars from various fields of anthropology, social sciences and humanities.
- Workshop proposal
- Bibliography
- Workshop session schedule (90 min.)
- Organizers bibliographies: Iraj Ghoochani, Ph.D.; Don Kunze, Ph.D.
- Links