Year: 2024
Medium: Realtime/Interactive Installation, Sculpture, Video Art, Robotic Performance
Venue: RAD Lab | Kent State University
Year: 2024
Medium: Realtime/Interactive Installation, Sculpture, Video Art, Robotic Performance
Venue: RAD Lab | Kent State University
A Purple Architecture
Year: 2024
Medium | Category: Book (Authorship), Book Design, Graphic Design, Typography, Illustration, Augmented Reality (AR), Digital Art
Co-editor, Book Design/Art, and AR Development: Ebrahim Poustinchi
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press
Brief Description:
A Purple Architecture book is an award-winning edited collection of essays and projects investigating Purpleness as a quality independent from the assumed virtual/physical, material/immaterial, mediated/immediate dualities. Purpleness thus serves as a theoretical framework to investigate the impacts of technological mediation in developing possible spatial scenarios through storytelling.
The book design of A Purple Architecture employs typography, image-making, digital art, AI, and augmented reality (AR) to revisit the “bookhood” of the book—both as an object and a medium—through a curated design and immersive—physical, virtual, and conceptual— worldbuildings.
Editors: James F. Kerestes, Ebrahim Poustinchi, Vahid Vahdat
Book Design, Art, and AR Development: Ebrahim Poustinchi
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A Purple Architecture has won the prestigious 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards as the book of the year in the “Art” category.
Book Blurb:
Rapid technological developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and robotic additive manufacturing, especially as pioneered by large tech companies, have failed to offer a cohesive aspirational agenda to reduce human suffering and oppression. Moving beyond the glamor of techno-optimism, a roadmap based on ecologies of human values is not only necessary as a framework for technological development but can also offer creative solutions to many of the socio-ecological crises we face. Such a creative roadmap, as many of the failed manifestos of the past century testify, is more effective if produced through dialogue.
A Purple Architecture addresses this ambition by provoking an interdisciplinary discussion among some of the most innovative leaders of the art and design fields. Through a critical examination of various design discourses, e.g., architecture, game design, media art, digital art, film production, and fashion, the book echoes the heterogeneous voice of a collective ambition for the future. Purpleness thus serves as a theoretical framework to investigate the impacts of technological mediation in providing spatial, and thereby socio-political, agency.
Winner of the 2024 Next Generation
Indie Book Awards as the book of the year
in the “Art” category .
In addition to the choose-your-own-adventure book format, and in response to the books’ themes and provocations, A Purple Architecture revisits the “bookhood” of the book—both as an object and a medium—through a curated design using extended reality (XR), worldbuilding, and machine-assisted visual interpretation of the chapters.
Book Design : .
Walking on a tightrope of the black-and-white binary, the book design employs typography—letters, figures, shapes, lines, symbols, numbers, and many other textual in-betweens—to break the black-and-white duality and establish purpleness as a desaturated quality.
The book also includes a series of image-based dividers that are cautiously crafted through an iterative human-machine collaborative design dialogue. While the prompts were limited by keywords from the chapter, each divider is a visualized artifact of a productive friction between the designer and the Generative Al. Maintaining their consistent characteristics throughout the book, each of the dividers is designed through a multi-agent process: The designer (as the main curator/creator), the Generative Al platform (functioning under a specific critical intention to maintain the human-machine collaborative dialogue), and the authors (who provided the keywords that triggered the prompt).
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From individual letter designs to choreographed negotiations between imagery and typography, to virtual objects, graphs, and semi-immersive spatial AR experiences, and from hand-crafted to machine-assisted design elements, the graphic design of the book aims to create a sensitive balance between the design independence of each chapter, section, and divider, while maintaining their overall consistency as part of a consistent purple whole.
