A Journey into The New Virtual, the exhibition explores how video games, artificial intelligence, and utopian renderings push the boundaries of design. The curators of the exhibition at the MAK Museum in Vienna suggest that the only limit to architecture and design is imagination and not technical, material, or financial factors.
Visitors are immersed in virtual fantasy landscapes where forward-thinking designs and fictional architecture scenarios bear no relation to the complexities of the real world. The museum shows how hyper-realistic visualizations and artificial intelligence algorithms are becoming more popular and have revolutionized the way design concepts are developed. These technologies are now available to people from different cultures and backgrounds who use them to imagine new environments and utopias that exist between assumptions and reality.
This is the first MAK exhibition to present a wide range of interior design, architecture, and urban planning in virtual reality. Most projects of the last decade (2013–2023) are shown. This is an excellent overview of the design strategies in the field of the “New Virtual” that exists in the international field. The exhibition name /imagine: is a command that users enter into the Midjourney artificial intelligence software to create their own architectural utopias. The platform uses a short text description to create images with limitless variations and modifications.
The four sections — Speculative Narratives and Worldbuilding, Scientific Research, Dreamscapes, and AI and Algorithmic Variation — showcase work in various media. Visualization, CGI visualization, 3D animation and printing, digital films and virtual reality, as well as blockchain projects and video games, allow us to explore what is now of concern to many in the field of social, environmental, political, and aesthetic issues.
Created during the pandemic, hyper-realistic digital artwork by Andres Reisinger and Alexis Christodoulou is filled with organic architecture, pink color, and stunning natural scenery. These works, often the subject of which is a demonstration of the laws of physics, are heavily influenced by botany and a reaction to isolation: physical restrictions prompted the mind to seek fantastic landscapes.
Speculative Narratives presents provocative visions of the future, including Liam Young’s Planet City (2020), set in a 2050 metropolis. Jatafa Henry’s VFX film Mother Earth Father Sky (2019) documented raw materials mined in the Congo. Young has been called “the man who creates our future”. He uses cinema to combine imagination with pressing environmental issues.
Artifacts and monuments destroyed by humans are reproduced using 3D printing, and artist Miriam Hillawi Abraham in the virtual game Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus offers to explore the historic city of Lalibela in Ethiopia in the section “Scientific research”, which shows how technology can be used for conservation and experimentation.
Some Place Studio designed the setting for the exhibition based on the artwork, which is custom 3D displays in the living room with infinity mirrors and seating that curves the space.
Architect and game designer Leah Wolfman’s project My Mid Journey Trash Pile (2022) also debuted at the show, turning AI images of buildings created in Midjourney from discarded building materials into oil paintings. In Symbiotic Home (since 2022), Lee Piwnick, founder of the Queer Ecology Institute, demonstrates how AI-enabled architectural visions can be used to create a “multi-species habitat” with the local South Florida community.
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