Tur #11/155

Tur is an A.I. generated art series created by Ganchitecture in collaboration with Adam Berninger of Tender – and takes its name from the root of 'tower' and the german word for door or doorway: a metaphor for the passage between eras that these towers symbolize.

For millennia, civilizations have used monumental structures to mark the rallying point of their tribe, their culture, and the claims they stake. Ultimately, these central pillars even became the symbols of their civilization, transcending each budding and ending of an era. Now, what has evolved from simple stone structures into complex temples and citadels is overshadowed by the complex urban organisms that define our greatest places of congregation.

Tur imagines a future where the global technoculture reaches its tipping point, and dominance is contested between humans and artificial intelligence. The resulting cultural regressions lead back to the iconic towering structures of civiliazations-past as a means for asserting authority. These structures serve as a visible counterpoint to the increasingly unseen and pervasive controls applied through technology. The return to this priapic symbol of power of course derives its formal and structural qualities from the completeness provided by an A.I. driven survey of historic towers and imposing architecture.

These raw, monumental, and anachronistic structures are imperfect and decaying – transforming their A.I. sources into a new typologies of future towers. Are these the creations of humanity’s last attempt at dominance or an auto-mechanistic creation of artificial intelligence that assimilates symbols of human power? Either way, their archetypal structures embody the anonymous remnants of future cultures: the places that last survive their epoch, and perhaps even the last earthly epoch.