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_id	ecaade2024_242
id	ecaade2024_242
authors	Koh, Immanuel; Saw, Man Lin
year	2024
title	Architectural Dramaturgy: A total and endless theatre with multimodal artificial intelligence
source	Kontovourkis, O, Phocas, MC and Wurzer, G (eds.), Data-Driven Intelligence - Proceedings of the 42nd Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe 2024), Nicosia, 11-13 September 2024, Volume 1, pp. 559–564
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.2024.1.559
summary	Close to a century ago, Walter Gropius proposed the highly influential but unrealised project ‘Total Theatre’ (1927). The project captured Gropius’ adapted formulation of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’(‘total work of art’) as ‘Total Design’ within the Bauhaus, and more specifically, in relation to ‘The Theatre of the Bauhaus’ (1924). The ‘Total Theatre’ was Gropius’ attempt to dynamically reconfigure the previously static relationship between actors and audience into one that is participatory and filmic in spatial layout. Around the same time in history, shortly after designing the set for Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Emperor Jones’ in 1924, Frederick Kiesler began to conceptualise his ‘Endless Theatre’ (1926). In the former, Kiesler created a constructivist stage space with moving walls/floors/ceilings animating in-sync with the play’s narrative and producing cinematographic effects similar to those found in films. For both Gropius and Kiesler, the theatre is a fertile ground for incorporating the latest technologies to prototype a ‘totally’ multimodal and ‘endlessly’ generative form of architecture. Against the backdrop of such past intellectual efforts in architecture, and that of today’s rapidly foregrounding of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in artificial intelligence (AI) within the architecture discipline, the paper posits that it is timely to revisit this conceptual cross-fertilisation of theatre and architecture – architectural dramaturgy. In doing so, the research aims to extend Gropius’s and Kiesler’s concept of the ‘total’ and the ‘endless’ respectively through the lens of the ‘computational’. The first experiment uses different datasets from existing established theatre creators to train and prompt-engineer relevant AI models, namely a text-to-text model for playwright Arthur Miller, a text-to-image model for director Ivo van Hove, and a text-to-audio model for composer Stephen Sondheim. In improving the coherence of the results, the second experiment replaces unimodality with multimodality leveraging a single source of video data (the poignant “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) to formulate a human-in-the-loop interpretative framework by utilising a combination of text-image-to-image model and text-image-to-video model, and further postprocessed with image inpainting model and image-to-3D model. With the deliberate bracketing of site, programmes and other specificities typical of an architecture project, the research demonstrates how concepts borrowed from theatre when layered with multimodal AI could extend the discipline’s longstanding conception of a total and endless architecture.
keywords	Theatre, Deep Learning, Large Multimodal Models, Kiesler, Gropius
series	eCAADe
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last changed	2024/11/17 22:05

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