Counter-Imaging the City-to-Come

An XR Lab workshop by Dave Loder.

Friday 30th May 2025, 10:30am- 2pm.

Please email richard@digitalartsstudios.com for details on how to participate.

Technology is the answer, but what was the question? – Cedric Price (1966)

Generative AI image-making processes, such as Dall-e, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, have rapidly become embedded in contemporary postdigital and image-saturated experience. While AI pioneers champion the novelty and accessibility to creativity the image-based tools can deliver, they face opposition on the grounds of privacy, copyright and bias. Moreover, with the image and its consumption an essential means by which we engage with the world, the artificial image has the potential to destabilise authenticity and propagate false realities. Under such terms, when the image is used to communicate specific visions of the world, and AI processes are embraced as tools in the making of new futures, we must critically and ethically reflect on the realities that are being produced. This can be most emblematically exposed by examining how image-based bias leans heavily into techno-utopian visions of the future, where technology is the solution to contemporary issues such as climate crisis, resource scarcity and the decline of globalisation.

In this workshop, participants will collaboratively explore, hack and develop creative approaches to generative AI image-making tools in the context of the city and its imaginaries. Through interrogating the ‘operative’ and ‘instrumental’ modes of AI imaging, the workshop will seek to claim and appropriate image-making tools to propose speculative conditions that critically reflect upon and offer alternatives to established spatial imaginaries of the city.

Bio:

Dave Loder is a creative practitioner, scholar and educator working fluidly across a diversity of creative practices including installation, interiors, architecture, landscape, sound, public art, immersive environments and world-building. Current practice-based research investigates the contemporary domestic condition and speculates on the experience of the home as (re)distributed and (re)mediated via digital technologies. Dave is currently Programme Director for the MA Interior, Architectural and Spatial Design at the Edinburgh College of Art.