Architect and professor Frank Jacobus has delved into the realm of AI-generated art to question: “What happens when fruit becomes furniture?” His playful new series titled “Fruity” presents a vivid collection of “juicy” fruit chairs – where ripe cantaloupe, passion fruit, grapes, and papayas become quirky new seating options.
Using Midjourney, Jacobus explores how emerging artificial intelligence technologies can envision new forms of hybridity and cross-pollination to fuse multiple objects with diverse identities into a new singular whole. In this series, he explores fruit and furniture as a hybrid through various surreal forms, shapes and textures.
Recently, traditional designers have increasingly begun to leverage the power of the emerging technological wave, adopting AI design tools such as Midjourney and DALL·E to expand their practices and explore the boundless potentials of generative design.
Among them, Frank Jacobus, a visual artist, architect, and architectural professor, takes on text-to-image program Midjourney. “This tool and others are transforming architecture and design thinking, with significant advances soon to come,” he comments. “They already allow designers to quickly produce anything they are imagining at the moment and to get immediate feedback with rich imagery”.
Using textual prompts, he explores visual iterations of chairs made from fruit, including dragon fruits, limes, and kiwis. While Midjourney only yet operates on a 2D visual dimension, Frank Jacobus playfully urges his audience to “imagine if these chairs had a subtle aroma you were sitting within.”
