← A. Inventions, No. 5
Piet Schrijnemakers (1929–2013)
Schrijnemakers’ Dioramas
1979
Office of Piet and Renate Schrijnemakers, est. 1952, Los Angeles, California. Cardboard and colored paper over medium-density fiberboard. 60 × 60 × 6". Collection of the author.
Gen Xers, if right now you’re hearing the ‘Theme from A Summer Place’, it’s because these images, in soft focus and slowly animating, were once the backgrounds behind ‘We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By’ on your local pbs affiliate.
But before designer Piet Schrijnemakers (1929–2013) sold them to wgbh/Boston, these were the maquettes he created for the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles, to accompany an exhibit about renewable energy. Prompted by the oil crisis of 1979, the exhibit focused on seven sources of power, which informed Schrijnemakers’ color choices: solar (orange), hydroelectric (blue), geothermal (red), nuclear (yellow), biomass (green), wind (grey), and fusion (red and white). Sadly, just three months before the museum was scheduled to open, the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor experienced a partial meltdown, and the ensuing skittishness caused the exhibit to be scuttled. The irony is that they’ve earned a life immortal on YouTube, where you’ll still find them accompanying Elsie David’s cooking shows, or old episodes of Brandt-Paley News Night.
Published December 7, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.
About
The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.
These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions, an inversion of the more pressing debate in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.
Previously:
No. 4. Gow’s Sensory Apparatus
Next:
No. 6. Acoustical Food Shapers
