In every process of evolution, there is a period of extreme contamination that lends the possibility for the trajectories of species to begin to mutate. In the last thirty years, design has experienced multiple paradigm shifts generated by an eruption of new methodologies. These were derived mainly from new technologies, but also from a series of cultural changes, each prompting a reorganization in the culture of design, architecture, and art, and violating an old order, rendering it historical, obsolete. Today, perhaps as never before, we share a technical language that flows from discipline to discipline, altering the paths of previously discrete branches of knowledge. Many practices—art, architecture, fashion, film, music—explore similar ambitions, ideas rippling across and among them. The notion of authorship itself is in flux. This exhibition acknowledges and propels this phenomenon. It seeks to carve a path through a jungle of aesthetic and conceptual similarities to provoke contamination. Through artificial intelligence, the work featured will be exposed to a perpetual state of transformation and mutation. The exhibition gathers a key set of practices, primarily from architecture, but also from art and fashion, to reveal facets of the strange beast that the tumultuous paradigm shifts of recent decades have left behind.

Hernan Diaz Alonso assumed the role of SCI-Arc director and chief executive officer in 2015. He has served as a distinguished faculty member since 2001, coordinator of the graduate thesis program (2007–10), and graduate programs chair (2010–15). Diaz Alonso is principal of HDA-X. His awards include: Educator of the Year award (2012) from the American Institute of Architects, AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture (2013) and Progressive Architecture Award (2013). Diaz Alonso’s work is in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre, Orleans, France; SFMOMA; The Museum of Modern Art; Thyssen-Bornemisza, MAK Museum, Vienna; and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, London Architecture Biennale, ArchiLab in Orleans, France; Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and MAK Centre, Vienna. He has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Over nearly five decades, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has remained unequalled in its reputation for risk and excellence. Founded in 1972, SCI-Arc is one of the nation’s few independent, nonprofit architecture schools. SCI-Arc’s mission is to reimagine the edges of architecture by educating architects to engage, speculate, and innovate the world around them. Our 500 students and 80 faculty members—most of whom are practicing architects—work together to test the limits of architecture and design. Located in the historic Santa Fe Freight Depot in downtown LA’s dynamic Arts District, the SCI-Arc campus is home to a 12,000 square foot RAD Center (robotics, analog, and digital), one of the largest and most advanced fabrication facilities at an architecture school in the US.