University of Tokyo – Department of Architecture

Architectural Informatics Guest Lecture Marcos Novak

A Leaf of the Wind of A Dream | Latent Architectures in Liquid Space – The Missions of Architecture in AI/ML/XR

Architectural Informatics. Guest Lecture 2

Date and time: November 21, 2022 (Mon.) 17:30:~
Venue: Room 221, Faculty of Engineering Building 2 map
Host: Yasushi Ikeda Architectural Informatics Research Lab.


Marcos Novak is a transarchitect, artist, composer, and theorist who employs algorithmic techniques to design actual, virtual, and hybrid intelligent environments.

Having embraced the digital in architecture as early as the late seventies, Marcos Novak is widely recognized as a pioneer of the study of virtual and extended environments as autonomous architectural spaces, and of algorithmic, generative, and now AI and machine learning approaches to architectural design and art.

He is Vice Chair and Professor of Media Arts and Technology at UCSB, and is the founding Director of the transLAB, a transmodal Worldmaking lab exploring Transformation that leads to speciation, in fact, in fiction, in action, affiliated with the UCSB AlloSphere research facility and CNSI (California NanoSystems Institute).

Prior to UCSB he taught at UCLA, University of Texas, Austin, and the Ohio State University, and is a frequent invited speaker and reviewer at many of the world’s most prestigious universities.

His work has been exhibited in numerous art and architecture biennials, museums, galleries, and other prominent venues around the world.

At the Banff Centre for the Arts, between 1991-1994, he created “Dancing With the Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress,” one of the first full-fledged transmodal /generative virtual reality artworks in the world, and the first to create immersive experiences of a fourth spatial dimension (with time being a fifth dimension).

In 2000 he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale, and has participated in the Venice Biennale numerous times since.

His projects, theoretical essays, and interviews have been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in over 70 countries, and he lectures, teaches, and exhibits worldwide. His many writings combine architecture, music, art, computation, science, and/or technology, and include such seminal papers as: Computational Composition in Architecture (1988), Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace (1991), Transmitting Architecture: The transPhysical City (1996), Transmitting Architecture Revisited: On the Occasion of the UIA World Congress, 2008, and Allopolis: A Transvergent Manifesto (2010), among others.

In 2008, “Transmitting Architecture”, the title of his seminal 1995 essay, became the theme of the xxiii World Congress of the UIA (Union Internationale Des Architectes, the largest architectural organization in the world.

The growing impact of his work is recognized in works such as Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde (2021) and The Encyclopedia of New Media Arts (2022).

He is the originator of the THEMAS (technologies, humanities, engineering, mathematics, arts, sciences) model of research, pedagogy, and practice. The THEMAS *model* extends and enhances the STEM and STEAM approaches to include the creative humanities as equal participants in the holistic, integrative, and creative project of Worldmaking, in fact, in fiction, in action. This model has been welcomed by receptive audiences around the world.

He is a Fellow of the World Technology Network, a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar of the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center, and serves on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed journals. Marcos Novak is in constant demand as a keynote speaker at conferences that span many fields.

Deeply interested in worldmaking, the future, and the avant-garde, he is also the fortunate recipient of a classical education in Greece, where he grew up. To reach farther into the future, we must also reach deeper into the past.


Since we have received several requests for this event, we have made it possible to watch the event online.
Please contact the following address if you would like to watch the seminar online.
Contact: Architectural Informatics Lab. sumitomo@arch1.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

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