Aurora Ex Machina

The project is concerned with the intersection between architecture and technology as a means for social reproduction. It challenges the contemporary state’s reliance on AI and the promise of technical resolution to socio-political issues. This is explored in a Finnish context focusing on the tension between the constitution, which conflates the privacy of the home with data privacy, and the state-sponsored AI program, Aurora AI. The mass housing system developed by Puutalo Oy in the post-war years is used as a conduit to describe the algorithmic logic of systems like Aurora and their flattening, normalising effects. The resultant proposal is a speculative future within which a designed algorithm infects/disrupts the Aurora Puutalo housing model, emanating from the data disturbances of an individual sauna and eventually taking over in Marttila, a suburb of Helsinki. https://2023.rca.ac.uk/students/thomas-mclucas/