About this Event
Interiorprovocations.org
Presentations Location: Pratt Institute Student Union | 200 Willoughby Avenue | Brooklyn, NY 11231
This year’s symposium will consist of lectures by participants and two exhibitions (to be physically present on the Pratt campus at the Juliana Curan Terrian Design Center Gallery and the Alumni Reading Room at the Pratt Library).
theme: #synthetic
The oldest and most etymologically faithful sense: synthetikos, skilled in putting together. An interior is fundamentally a synthetic artifact, an assembly of disparate elements (surfaces, objects, light, programs, bodies) composed into a legible whole. Those interiors have histories; narratives that make and remake them, real and perceived.
What makes them #synthetic? Are they copies? Produced by codes or rules? Perceived to be unnatural? Simply not present? Each association carries its own freight, different questions about how the whole is assembled.
We ask participants to skillfully put together their research and interrogate these varied associations: to locate, within the #synthetic interior, the standards, assumptions, and conventions that shape what we recognize as whole.
Proposals should embrace one of the following subthemes:
## 1. The Synthetic Designer (or Author)
What is an interior when its creation is automated? As just one example: AI systems now generate floor plans, render photorealistic interiors, and propose spatial arrangements from text prompts alone: designs drawn from vast corpuses of prior human design, yet produced without the embodied spatial knowledge, social intuition, or ethical commitments that have historically defined the discipline. What values are embedded (and whose are excluded) in the data and code that produce these environments? Are these processes collaboration or appropriation (or both)? Are questions about a maker’s autonomy new? This node invites investigations of design agents and their precedents (architectural treatises, pattern books, collecting and interior decorating manuals, trade literature, other rule-based systems), and their implications for authorship, labor, professionalization, and disciplinary identity in interior design.
## 2. The Synthetic Environment
The planetarium recreates the universe in a room: designed not to shelter but to transport. It belongs to a long lineage of environments engineered to produce an experience of outside inside: the cyclorama, the diorama, the world's fair pavilion, the botanical conservatory, the reconstructed cave at a natural history museum. Each is a physically inhabited space whose interior surfaces and atmospheres are composed to produce a credible, or deliberately incredible, elsewhere. This node invites proposals that examine the logics, strategies, and politics of physically immersive unnatural environments and the forms of knowledge, wonder, and ideology they produce.
## 3. The Synthetic Surface
Trompe l'oeil, faux bois, marbling, gilding, laminates: the interior has always trafficked in surfaces that pretend to be something other than what they are. They may be a substitute for an existing material or a response to new needs or ambitions. These are sites where material hierarchies, class aspirations, and ideas about authenticity are made legible (or illegible). This node invites proposals examining the long history and contemporary evolution of simulated materials in interior environments and the economies/ legacies of taste, value, and deception they sustain or upend.
Each node is designed as a clear conceptual center with a contestable boundary: specific enough to generate focused proposals, open enough to invite interpretation from historians, theorists, and practitioners across the streams of the symposium.
All text above was co-written and edited by Interior Provocations & claude.ai.
Keynote Speaker:
Jenny Sabin | Professor | Chair of the Department of Design Tech | Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture | Director of Graduate Studies in Design Technology | Co-Director of the M.S. in Design Technology | Cornell University
Schedule:
9:00 am – 9:30 am Introductions
Location: Memorial Hall
9:30 am – 11:30 am Presentations Session I
Location: Memorial Hall
Amy F Ogata “Resurfacing the Second Empire”
Professor | University of Southern California | Department of Art History | Los Angeles, CA
Alina Hoffman "Agents and Agency: Assessing the Use of Generative AI Tools Through a Disability Studies Lens"
Visiting Assistant Professor | Pratt Institute | School of Design | Brooklyn, NY
Elizabeth Carroll "Surface and Illusion: Simulated Lacquer, Process, and Taste in Early Modern Venice"
Senior Lecturer | San Josè State University | Department of Art and Art History | San Jose, CA
Heather Molecke "The Synthetic Environment"
Instructor | Louisiana State University | Baton Rouge, LA
11:30 am – 12:30 pm Exhibits
Multiple locations
#Synthetic Exhibit
Location: Design Center Gallery
#Synthetic Collection at the Library
Location: Pratt Library | AlumniReading Room
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Lunch
1:30 pm – 3:30 pm Presentations Session II
Location: Memorial Hall
Rachel Rosengarten Hunnicutt “Synthesizing the Severed Floor: Bell Labs, Lumon, and the Interior Palimpsest”
PhD Candidate | William & Mary | American Studies | Williamsburg , VA
Suzanne Lettieri "Social Surfaces"
Assistant Professor. | Cornell University | College of Architecture, Art, and Planning | Ithaca, NY
Sara Reed "The Archive as Synthetic Interior: Collage, Speculation, and Revolutionary Havana"
Assistant Professor | Virginia Commonwealth University | Department of Interior Design | Richmond, VA
Rana Abudayyeh "Pixels to Places"
Associate Professor | University of Tennessee, Knoxville | College of Architecture and Design | School of Interior Architecture | Knoxville, TN
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm Exhibits
Multiple locations
#Synthetic Collection
Location: Pratt Library | Alumni Reading Room
#Synthetic Exhibit
Location: Design Center Gallery
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm Keynote
Location: Memorial Hall
Jenny Sabin "Biosynthetic Design: Towards Adaptive Architecture"
Professor | Chair of the Department of Design Tech | Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture | Director of Graduate Studies in Design Technology | Co-Director of the M.S. in Design Technology | Cornell University | Ithaca, NY
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Reception
Location: Pratt Library | Alumni Reading Room
TWO EXHIBITS
Juliana Curran Terian Design Center Gallery
Alumni Reading Room Pratt Library
#Synthetic Exhibit at the Juliana Curran Terian Design Center Gallery
Hannah Berkin-Harper & Tracey Weisman
Shad3d: Knitting the Synthetic Atmosphere
Michelle Boyoung Huh
More than Motif: The Synthetic Agency of the Flowered Interior
Ria Bravo
Synthesis without assembly: drawing the interior under construction
Felicia Francine Dean & Benjamin Sechrest
Reverberation
Alicia Imperiali
Aviorama—Scene from on high
Joette Jones
The Synthetic Designer: Data Literacy, AI, and the Case for a More Equitable Design Process
Grace Ong Yan
Humanizing the Synthetic: Environmental Graphics and the Production of Spatial Meaning
Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman
The Body as Interior: Wearable Technology and the Synthetic Environment
Juan Roldan
Chinese Whispers: The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace as Synthetic Orientalism
Stephen Shkreli
The Latent Act
Xinyue Lulu Yu
The Photographic Studio and the Home: Synthetic Training in Wedding Photography in Reform-era Chengdu
Alfred Zollinger
Splinters & Fragments
#Synthetic Cabinet of Curiosities Exhibit at the Alumni Reading Room Pratt Library
Organizers:
Anca Lasc
Erica Morowski
Deborah Schneiderman
Keena Suh
Karin Tehve
Karyn Zieve
Image Credit: Interior Provocations Team + Midjourney
Event venue & nearby stays
Pratt Institute, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
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