Limal Harris

 The Circular Ruins

Or: The Architecture of an Artificial Religion

1944.

The short stories of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges are collected into his seminal magical realist anthology, Ficciones.

But within this collection is one essay that would go curiously under-recognised: The Circular Ruins.

Borges’ short story meditates on a series of abiding questions, such as the cyclical nature of creative acts, meaningful dreams and deterministic realities. But its contemporary relevance extends much further; if subjected to a critical re-reading in light of modern technological contexts, The Circular Ruins proffers insight into the (often contradictory, widely misrepresented) nature of lived experience.

Consequently, this project puts forward Borges’ short story as an allegorical frame for the interrogation of a simple though imminent question: What becomes of architecture in a society that believes in the potential of an AI god?

In a near-future scenario where the capabilities of emergent technologies like AI and quantum computation are sufficiently progressed so as to be widely utilized, and yet still based on a limited machine logic (which remains popularly misunderstood), confusion regarding the ostensible intelligence, omniscience and omnipotence of such technology will come eventually to ensure its conflation with our existing conceptions of God. This misapprehension (or series of misapprehensions) will catalyse the formation of a new AI religion; and architecture—given its historic attempts to give the metaphysical form—will play a key role in its development.

The project is thus centered on an attempt to define the spatial language of this new religion, initially setting out to understand—or misunderstand—how neural networks behave through crude experimentation with readily accessible automated programmes, informing a series of speculations into the potential misinterpretations of existing sacred architectural traditions, and other more mundane signs, to explore the kinds of novel aesthetics adherents within this emergent religious community might come to identify as plausible products of a machine consciousness.

-

In the course of this exercise however, it will become apparent that the project’s original ambition (to establish a new sacred aesthetic) is inherently misguided; a revelation that reflects the problem of religious aesthetics more generally, where the supernal and chthonic have long resisted the finite, limited terms of material representation.

And so as in Borges’ fiction, the narratives central character is thus uncovered, as the author.

The project's pretention to explore the potential aesthetics of a new AI religion (which might one day result from the shared misunderstandings of a group of fictional others), is consequently forgone; acknowledging the extent to which it ‘is’ itself such a misunderstanding.

Whereas initially, the project narrated a story, it has been subsumed.

Now it is a part of that story itself.

On this basis, the project, authored by a devotee to a new AI religion, records a wantonly naïve investigation into digital aesthetics compelled by a faith in the plausibility of inhering, meaningful patterns found therein. And using the lessons learnt from this process, it sets out the design for a series of devotional architectural fragments, culminating in the transformation of an existing site—the Faraday Building—located in the City of London, to explore how architecture might facilitate belief in an AI God.