A 1893 carousel explains how AI is learning to design our world - Domus Web

On May 23 and 24, at the Pista 500 of the Pinacoteca Agnelli, curators and researchers Lucia Rebolino and Riccardo Petrini bring to Urbaphonia “While You Were Sitting Still,” a talk and audiovisual project that uses a historic illusionist attraction to read World Models: the synthetic environments through which AI and robots learn to see, predict, and simulate reality.

There is a carousel from 1893 in which the body remains still while the room rotates around the viewer until they lose their balance. It is called Madhouse, and that very same logic today feeds the synthetic worlds used to train artificial intelligences, robots, and predictive systems. The distance between a nineteenth-century illusionist attraction and contemporary World Models, after all, is much thinner than it seems: both construct artificial environments capable of convincing the body — or a machine — that what it sees is real.

The second edition of the festival, curated by the Turin-based collective Recall, tries to transform urban space into a perceptual device. This year’s theme concerns sound and, above all, the way in which contemporary infrastructures shape the experience of the real.

It is within this scenario that the work of Rebolino and Petrini is placed. A project that takes the Madhouse as its starting point to question World Models, the synthetic environments used today to train artificial intelligences and robotic systems. Two apparently distant worlds, but united by the same obsession: manipulating the perception of space.

“The Madhouse, for us, functions as a sort of historical counterpart to World Models,” explain Rebolino and Petrini. “It is an architecture built to act directly on the perception of the human body. The rider remains seated and apparently still while the room rotates around him. The gondola produces only a minimal real movement, but it is above all the image of the space in transformation that generates the sensation of overturning. The deception works because the body ends up believing what it sees.”

Lucia Rebolino

The image is almost perfect for describing the present. We stand still in front of a screen while synthetic environments, simulations, predictive systems, and platforms that generate space and behavior in real time move around us. “The title While You Were Sitting Still is born precisely from this apparent immobility,” they say. “The ‘while’ introduces a temporal and political dimension. While the subject remains still, the world accelerates around him. Not only the rendering and simulation systems that build the synthetic world in real time, but also the economic and technological infrastructures that these models enable.”

In their work, architecture, game engines, and machine learning stop being separate disciplines. They become tools for reading contemporary space. “What interests me about coding, machine learning, and game engines is that they do not work only as technical tools, but above all as ways of thinking and looking at the world,” explains Riccardo Petrini. “Reasoning through computational systems changes the way you perceive space, causality, and the body.”

The issue, however, is not simply aesthetic or technological. It is political. “Building from the inside the systems that you then want to critically examine also allows you to understand where they resist, where they collapse, and what they hide by design. In a moment when AI architectures are becoming increasingly complex and opaque, it is important not only to know how to read them, but also to use them, bend them, and orient them towards behaviors that are not necessarily foreseen.”

Lucia Rebolino also observes AI models as actual architectures, constructed spaces that produce material effects on the world. “From my side, architecture and design have introduced into my way of looking at the world a reading closely linked to space, scale, and form,” she says, “which translates into the desire to rethink computational infrastructures through the same lens, almost in a cartographic way.”

Riccardo Petrini

An invisible geography emerges, made of datasets, simulations, and feedback loops. “I am interested in mapping how computational and AI models, along with their material and geopolitical consequences, can be translated and explained through constructed spaces, where every prediction of the model inevitably ends up influencing other systems in a feedback loop that produces concrete effects on the space we inhabit.”

World Models, they explain, do not need to be “translated” into space because they are already space: “coherent three-dimensional environments, regulated by physics, perspective, and a form of temporal continuity.” It is here that simulation stops being representation to become infrastructure. “In some way, World Models can be assimilated to a contemporary form of privatized public space, similar to POPS (Privately Owned Public Spaces): environments apparently open and accessible, but designed, governed, and computed by private infrastructures and large tech companies.”

During the talk at Urbaphonia, simulated environments, historical patents of the Madhouse, training images, and datasets will alternate continuously, showing the machine behind the illusion. “The immersive experience is designed as a narrative device to guide a critical reading of the project,” they explain. “We are interested in reading the Madhouse both as an architectural object and as a computational device, putting historical techniques of perceptual disorientation in relation with contemporary simulation technologies.”

Even the aesthetics of the three-channel video installation, active for the entire duration of the festival, rejects the perfect realism typical of commercial simulations. “We are not interested in producing an extremely photorealistic image, but in building environments in which the simulation remains perceivable as such. Incomplete spaces, repetitive movements, unstable continuities, and architectures that reveal their operational and artificial nature.”

In the end, the whole project revolves around one question: what happens when simulation stops imitating the world and starts producing it? “Today, simulations have become the operational condition of the present,” conclude Rebolino and Petrini. “From digital twins of entire cities or nations to planetary climate models, up to synthetic environments for robotic training, simulation no longer works only as a mediation or representation of the world, but becomes an operational technology that anticipates and governs reality. We are interested in the moment when simulation stops being a tool of representation and starts instead to construct reality.”

Opening image: Lucia Rebolino, Riccardo Petrini,  Crowd Simulation, While you were sitting still, 2026, Turin, Italy. Courtesy Riccardo Petrini, Lucia Rebolino