New Pedagogies: Intermundium: Labyrinth of Invisible Narratives

This course reimagines the Cabinet of Curiosities as an immersive space for lost stories, spectral histories, and unstable memories. Rather than housing objects, these cabinets become architectures of transformation—where narratives dissolve, reassemble, and unfold in unexpected ways.

48-313/48-613 E
Instructors: Niloufar Alenjery
The Dreaming Machine

The Dreaming Machine

This course reimagines the Cabinet of Curiosities as an immersive space for lost stories, spectral histories, and unstable memories. Rather than housing objects, these cabinets become architectures of transformation—where narratives dissolve, reassemble, and unfold in unexpected ways.

Students will construct speculative memory machines and bizarre viewing devices—architectural instruments that distort, reveal, and reframe forgotten pasts and imagined futures. Through counterfactual inquiry, we’ll ask: What if history had unfolded differently? Artificial Intelligence becomes a collaborator—an apparatus of memory and hallucination—used to generate alternate historical trajectories and architectural fictions.

Projects will blend drawing, narrative, and performative representation to create works that are not static depictions but evolving, participatory artefacts. Memory becomes spatial, porous, and active—revealing itself through layers, textures, and shifting frames of perception.

Architecture emerges here as a vessel for reimagining what the past could have been—and what futures might still be possible.