ACT 1

The ‘Everyday Normal Monobloc’, with its endless machinic production but homogenous design variations, is generally hated and despised by designers, but has continued to exert its usefulness, messiness, and even place-making-ness in public spaces everywhere.

ACT 2

The ‘Artist Bricolage Monobloc’, with its D-I-Y/collage-based formal operations and layered narratives, is a form of design critique by hacking everyday normal monoblocs and showing them as one-off art pieces in esteemed museums.

ACT 3

The ‘Neural Monobloc Black’ is the Final Act. It is the focus of this exhibition which features eight physical artefacts that are generated and fabricated directly in 3D through a custom fine-tuned text-to-3D AI model developed at Artificial-Architecture. The ‘Neural Monobloc Black’ is the hallucinated result of an AI model’s attempt in deconstructing and reconstructing a hypothetical 3D monobloc from its flatland training set of 2D monobloc imagery. Its appearance of uncanniness suggests an underlying Freudian ‘repetition’ and ‘doubling’. Its appearance of wrongness might be explained by a quote from Mark Fisher — “The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.” The blackbox of artificial intelligence and the charred-black chairs are instrumentalised here to question our all-too-human conception and perception of what design is and can be.