AI Chapel is a conceptual immersive installation in Berlin that reimagines what a church could feel like if it existed in the Uncanny Valley. Through deliberate spatial distortions and AI-generated elements, it explores that uncomfortable space where something looks almost familiar but feels subtly wrong. The project questions how we might experience sacredness when the boundaries between natural and artificial blur.
Designing the Uncanny in Interior Architecture
Instead of an overtly futuristic or dystopian space, the AI Chapel mimics the traditional aesthetics of a church, but with deliberate, unsettling distortions. The installation uses four main strategies to create this unsettling atmosphere::
Material Misdirection:
Plush carpets appear in unexpected places, such as the toilet, creating a discomforting contrast between domestic warmth and sanitary unease.
Stone textures reveal themselves to be soft and yielding, while what seems like wood is actually cold metal, confusing tactile expectations.
Spatial Distortions:
Size inconsistencies subtly alter proportions like chairs that look normal from a distance turn out to be too small, forcing visitors into awkward postures.
Vaulted ceilings feel slightly too low, creating an almost imperceptible compression that unsettles without clear cause.
AI as a Liturgical Medium:
A digital confessional booth replaces the priest with an AI-generated voice, offering responses that are mechanically empathetic yet emotionally hollow.
The organ plays autonomously, its melodies composed by machine learning, shifting unpredictably between harmonic familiarity and eerie dissonance.
An AI-generated sermon loops in a near-human cadence, but pauses and inflections feel slightly off, leaving listeners in a state of cognitive discomfort.
Architectural Absurdities:
The organ loft has no staircase, visible yet inaccessible, reinforcing a sense of displacement.
Key religious symbols appear out of place or subtly altered, making the space feel strangely impersonal despite its sacred references.
Through deliberate architectural near-miss design, the AI Chapel transforms the Uncanny Valley into a tool for introspection, inviting visitors to experience unease as a form of spiritual reflection. The result is a sacred space that is neither wholly human nor fully artificial, hovering in an unsettling limbo between the two... a modern shrine to the uncertainties of our technological age.
