To begin to address who the authors, or the artists are in this project is a murky question. Seeking clarity on that requires you wade into the emerging debate of the effect artificial intelligence will have on visual culture. I don’t care to do that at this time, and I guess my role in this project has been that of “Editor”. I provided the parameters for the project, asking people to share a sentence-long prompt that I feed into an AI system called “MidJourney'' that produces images from text. Then I review and re-roll the outputs, request revisions, and try to eek-out something close to what the participants requested.
Participants briefly describe a vision for Miami’s built environment that responds to local climate and biodiversity issues. Some are utopian, others catastrophic. Some are just strange and fun. What I like about the process is it enables many people, not just artists, to engage in an easy act of visualizing different ways to live with environmental change. The prompts you’ll read have been shared by artists, designers, architects, climate-strategists, conservationists, biologists, writers, high-schoolers, friends and family. Collectively, they spawn a day-dream for a “wild” place to call home, a world made of locally-sourced limestone structures that filter potable water, crawling with autonomous rovers facilitating sea-grass restoration, illuminated by bioluminescent innovations at domestic and infrastructural scales.
