'What is Abu Dhabiness?' Exhibition challenges AI's stereotypical view of the UAE at Venice Biennale

The Dis-Orientalist came directly as a result of the evident gap in how the technology perceives the country

An image generated by The Dis-Orientalist AI platform. Photo: Zayed University

At Zayed University, a student’s attempt to portray the UAE through AI animation repeatedly hit a wall. The software kept defaulting to deserts and opulent skylines, ignoring the diversity of the country’s urban landscape and culture.

This frustration served as inspiration for four faculty members at the university. They began building an image database aimed at offering a richer, more accurate visual language for Emirati architecture and culture, particularly that of Abu Dhabi.

“The student had an interesting story prepared and wanted to have culture and architecture represented in it,” multimedia professor Omair Faizullah says. “But no matter what she did, she could not get the results she wanted. Instead, it kept generating a stereotypical form – like an Instagram picture – which is not exactly a representation of the area.”

Enter The Dis-Orientalist, which is being showcased at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The project was developed as a collaboration among Faizullah, Lina Ahmad, Marco Sosa and Roberto Fabbri, faculty members from the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises. It amasses a data pool of images of architecture from Abu Dhabi in an AI model that offers a nuanced perspective of the emirate.

An image generated by The Dis-Orientalist AI model. Photo: Zayed University

The project’s title is a pun, referring to an exotic and static perception of the region, as well as to a state of disorientation caused by AI.

“We are disoriented by this technology and how these technologies are coming into the field of architecture,” Fabbri says. “These new tools are changing the profession, and we are trying to understand how we should interact with that, but it is also changing teaching in schools and universities. That’s where we start putting those two meanings together.”

AI is only as good as the data its intelligence relies on. As such, the team set out to collect thousands of images of structures in Abu Dhabi, most of them examples of modernist architecture. The photographs, Ahmad notes, were sourced from Abu Dhabi Streets, an Instagram account run by Silvia and Alex, European nationals who have lived in Abu Dhabi for close to a decade.

“We went and looked at Abu Dhabi buildings that were mostly constructed in the late 1980s and the 1990s,” Ahmad says.

Fabbri adds: “We were interested in collecting the data because without a data set, there’s no project. The data set defines and determines the output of the project. Thanks to Silvia and Alex, we were able to put together 7,000 lesser-­known images of Abu Dhabi.”

The black and white images are source photographs taken by Abu Dhabi Streets, the coloured images have been generated by The Dis-Orientalist. Photo: Zayed University

Through a grant from Zayed University, the four faculty members began developing an AI model that would come to generate images of new structures based on these “lesser-known” examples. This was no straightforward task, and required the team to develop a visual lexicon of architectural elements within the images – pinpointing what constitutes a door or a window. “The way that things are put together, especially in an architectural pattern, is all based on a canonical structure,” Faizullah says. “A window, door or facade can be put together in infinite configurations. The training involved feeding the AI all of these images, and asking the algorithm to start to understand what’s what. Especially with the architecture of the UAE, a lot of these terminologies are not very defined. We had to create our own method of introducing that kind of topology into the training.”

The technology, Ahmad adds, may also help identify what is “Abu Dhabiness”.

“We all live in Abu Dhabi,” she says. “We look at buildings and neighbourhoods, and we see what we call Abu Dhabiness. But what does that mean? I think that the software is one of the things that can extract the DNA of Abu Dhabi. It can also generate infinite examples of an impossible Abu Dhabi, which feels familiar but doesn’t exist in real life.”

So what are the implications for a technology such as The Dis-Orientalist? Faizullah says it has “tremendous educational potential, whereby students can understand the history of the region, its cultural heritage and visual language, and then use it to create new things”.

The platform, Ahmad adds, offers “an infinite example of regional architecture, something that’s vernacular, something that’s from the region, so students could keep looking, learning and feeding into their design”.

This may spark a resurgence of modernist elements in contemporary designs, but Fabbri adds that the team is not advocating a modernist renaissance, but rather proposing an educational platform that may inspire new techniques and trends in contemporary design.

“Perhaps if you have an intervention in the city centre, maybe then you want to harmonise the new intervention with the existing structure,” he says.

The project, the faculty members note, is still in its early stages and the aim is to make it as accessible as possible – or, as Ahmad puts it, “to democratise the conceptual process of conceptual design”.

The generated images are designed to seem simultaneously familiar and unreal. Photo: Zayed University

“We’re also thinking of how we can use the tool to open it beyond architecture,” Ahmad adds. “So we’re starting to have this conversation and dialogues with different disciplines, and inviting them to contribute or think how this can be appropriated.”

The exhibit at the Venice Biennale is a sneak peek at The Dis-Orientalist. The faculty members are planning to offer a more comprehensive look at the project in a more immersive exhibition, this time presented locally.