INTENTIONAL SEAMFULNESS
Academic Work | Individual Work
Image_Space - Cornell AAP
Year: SP 2025 Type: Visual Representation
Instructor: Ekin Erar
Lo-Fi Tools for a Hi-Tech World
Imperfection as a Critique of AI
In an era increasingly dominated by seamless, AI-generated imagery, these projects take a critical stance by exploring an alternative path: one rooted in imperfection, tactility, and physical presence. Rather than striving for digital polish, the work embraces friction, randomness, and material processes to question the value of image-making in architecture. Each experiment foregrounds qualities that AI cannot replicate—texture, failure, time, and place—reminding us that images are not just outputs to be optimized, but artifacts shaped by human hands and lived experience.
#1
Analogue Photoshop
If you blur your eyes, it almost looks like a Mark Rothko painting at first. It’s really flat, but at the same time, it has a roughness, richness, and depth in it. I first focused on the flatness of this image. I started to deconstruct this image into different layers of surfaces and played with various ways of overlaying.
Then I realized that multiplying each layers in digital world doesn’t allow me to achieve the similar kind of lo-fi, but also kind of rich texture of the surfaces. So I started printing out the surfaces on mylar and overlayed those in physical material world.
The experiment with materiality of mylar gives me several insights.
1) If you overlap more than 4 layers, you cannot tell what’s going on behind the 4th layer.
2) The ink on the mylar is easy to be scratched out.
Based on these notions, I merged some surfaces and limited the number of layers under 4, and created the rough texture by taping and untaping the masking tape.
Deconstruction
Then I realized that multiplying each layers in digital world doesn’t allow me to achieve the similar kind of lo-fi, but also kind of rich texture of the surfaces. So I started printing out the surfaces on mylar and overlayed those in physical material world.
The experiment with materiality of mylar gives me several insights.
1) If you overlap more than 4 layers, you cannot tell what’s going on behind the 4th layer.
2) The ink on the mylar is easy to be scratched out.
Based on these notions, I merged some surfaces and limited the number of layers under 4, and created the rough texture by taping and untaping the masking tape.
Reconstruction
Creating Roughness
#2
Seamful Collage Generator
Seamful Collage Generator is my criqitue of a world saturated with AI-generated images. AI excels at:
1) Responding to shared context
2) Creating seamless images
3) Faking reality convincingly
With this small gadget, I set out to do the opposite: things AI cannot do:
1) Making completely random image selection
2) Intentionally making it seamful
3) Exist physically in the reality
This is my way of surviving in an AI-dominated world: by questioning what aspects of image-making in architecture remain irreplaceable by machines.
1) Responding to shared context
2) Creating seamless images
3) Faking reality convincingly
With this small gadget, I set out to do the opposite: things AI cannot do:
1) Making completely random image selection
2) Intentionally making it seamful
3) Exist physically in the reality
This is my way of surviving in an AI-dominated world: by questioning what aspects of image-making in architecture remain irreplaceable by machines.
1. Foreground / 2. Architecture / 3. Background / 4. Color Filter
#3
Reverse-Perspective Collage Generator
Reverse-perspective Collage Generator extends my previous critique of AI-generated images. While retaining the randomness and seamfulness of the earlier device, this version focuses on maximizing “nowness”: the qualities of time, place, and material presence. Elements rooted in the physical world that AI can never truly replicate.
The secret of the reverse-perspective structure only reveals itself in person, as you rotate the object or move around it. Its design, with an empty top and a reflective bottom, intentionally captures the sky above and ground below, allowing the surrounding environment to become part of the image.
This is a collage generator that documents the time and space you’re in, an image-making process grounded in physical experience, whose full meaning unfolds only in the real world.
The secret of the reverse-perspective structure only reveals itself in person, as you rotate the object or move around it. Its design, with an empty top and a reflective bottom, intentionally captures the sky above and ground below, allowing the surrounding environment to become part of the image.
This is a collage generator that documents the time and space you’re in, an image-making process grounded in physical experience, whose full meaning unfolds only in the real world.
I had a lot of fun exploring my image-making skills
:)