The University of Texas Lecture Series: Karel Klein

Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has been working with various AI technologies since 2016. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image objects produced using atypically trained GANs (generative adversarial networks) and their capacity for contemporary myth-making in architecture. In the same way that imaginative vocabulary and metaphoric style were primary literary instruments for the invention of new mythologies for the Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using AI are similarly a kind of matter metaphor-ed and made visible by the cyborg imagination.

With these tools, Karel is interested in the re-enchantment of the architectural body—one that foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions. And one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational. Her work in this realm has been at the 2021 Venice Biennale; at the FRAC Institute, in Orleans, France. Also, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis; and SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent essays include “Verto Pellis” in Offramp, issue 17; “Machines are Braver than Art” in “Rendering Fiction,” Paprika!, volume 7, issue 8. Also, “Machines À Rechercher,” in Log 55, summer 2022. Karel teaches currently at Washington University, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).