Presentation

SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Speaker: Daniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli, Designing The Computational Image
DescriptionDaniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli’s joint presentation will explore the entwining of computer graphics and interactive techniques with design and architecture, a territory they have been charting both through their individual scholarship and collaborative work. Drawing on extensive archival materials from research laboratories across North America and the U.K. — including rare images, films, and software reconstructions — their talk will reveal the inventive, and sometimes flawed, attempts to harness the computer as a creative tool. Foregrounding imagination as both a motive and effect of technological pursuits, and as an approach to history-making, the presentation will underscore the mutual formation of technologies and conceptions of design, creativity, and work. Further, it will show how we might challenge the boundary between memory and imagination: what it means to remember the past, and to imagine the future.

Daniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli are the founders of lattice.space, a platform for critical and creative research at the nexus of design and computation, and the co-authors and co-editors of Designing the Computational Image (AR+D 2023), a book visually examining the history of computational methods for representation, simulation, and manufacturing and their contemporary repercussions across creative fields. Their work, both as individual scholars and as collaborators, explores the historical entwining of computing with design and architecture.

Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D., is associate professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the Computational Design program and directs the Computational Design Laboratory (CodeLab). He is the author of numerous publications, exhibitions, and technologies critically examining the interplay of computing and design including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Routledge 2015). Cardoso has received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Manufacturing Futures Institute, Google, and Autodesk among others; has held visiting fellowships at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and at Leuphana, Germany; and is a 2024-2025 Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow. He is co-editor, with Terry Knight, of the “Design, Technology, and Society” Routledge book series, was ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Papers Chair, and is papers co-chair for the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW).

Theodora Vardouli, Ph.D., is associate professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, where she directs the Computational Design Exploratory (CoDEx). She is the author of awarded articles and chapters on architectural histories of computing and has published three books, including Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons (MIT Press forthcoming 2024) and Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (co-edited with Olga Touloumi, Routledge 2020). Vardouli is a grantee of the Canada Foundation of Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec among others. Her work has received several recognitions, including the 2022 Best Paper Award by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and the 2022 Mahoney Prize (with David Theodore) by the Special Interest Group for Computing Information and Society (SIGCIS). Vardouli serves on the editorial board of Technology, Architecture + Design and is editor of the upcoming issue Coding.
Event Type
Keynote Speaker
TimeWednesday, 31 July 20242:30pm - 3:30pm MDT
LocationBluebird Ballroom
Recordings
Livestreamed
Recorded
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Wednesday