Pattern Language 2-253 critically examines these questions and evolving relationships, probing the potentials and limitations of language in describing the intersections of physical and virtual spaces.

The project’s micronarratives draw inspiration from the 253 chapters of Christopher Alexander’s 1977 text, A Pattern Language. Starting with investigations of large rural landscapes and progressively zooming into cities, neighborhoods, streets, and individual architectures, these patterns create a kind of prototypical hypertext, suggesting combinations of multiple socio-spatial forms and relationships.

Rather than updating Alexander’s original text, this project imagines 253 new, near-future patterns by creating a matrix of relationships between increasingly specific spaces and various descriptive voices – paranoid, surreal, speculative, and science fictional, among others. These textual provocations are generated by a natural language processing system trained on massive amounts of available internet data, combined with content from A Pattern Language itself. Thus, the project explores contemporary and near-future paradigms in which not only spatial design, but indeed language, memory, imagination, and creativity are bound up in a complex of human and machine co-production.

While the patterns imagine forms, concepts, and speculative futures for the built environment, they furthermore suggest strategies for transmediation, where the output of an LLM or other AI system is not the final object, rather it serves as a prompt back to the artist to create something in another material or medium. Here, Pattern 122: Voronoi Cubes suggests architectures designed in an arrangement of interlocking polygons, creating chaotically fractured visual patterns. This informed the parametrically designed and 3D printed molds that were used to cast the concrete sculptures. Similarly, Pattern 210: Talking Machines prompted the design and fabrication of concrete megaphones which amplify the spoken patterns throughout the installation.

This translation from textual pattern to visual form is also seen in the many channels of real-time, generative images that run throughout the installation on 6 sculpturally arranged monitors and 1 large, composited video projection. Pattern 123: Point Clouds, Pattern 230: Wireframe Cottage, and Pattern 186: Hypercubes suggest parametric and digitally rendered formats, as well as the uncanny sensation of encountering such forms in the built or natural environment.