Dario Negueruela del Castillo

Visiting researcher

Dr. Dario Negueruela del Castillo has been serving as the Scientific Coordinator at the Center for Digital Visual Studies (Max Planck Institute - University of Zurich) since January 2020. From 2017 to 2019, he held the position of Head of Research at the ALICE lab at EPFL, where he earned his PhD in 2017 with a dissertation entitled “The City of Extended Emotions.”

Dr. Negueruela del Castillo’s current research focuses on the implicit urban theory of Foundation Multimodal Deep Learning Models through his project “Clip and the City,” which examines how to leverage these models’ general learner capacities for urban analysis. He is also actively involved in the critical spatial curation of large collections using AI, demonstrated in his project “Newly Formed City” for the Helsinki Biennial. His research spans architecture, urbanism, affect, and spatial and visual perception with an emphasis on imagination and spatial agency. Among others his current projects ‘On the Urbanity of Images’ and ‘Multimodality and Digital Apophenia’ explore the processes of machinic imagination, mimesis. and love and artificial desire.

In addition to his research, Dr. Negueruela del Castillo is the co-founder, along with Shin Koseki, of Data Think, a research and educational platform dedicated to critical and creative approaches to data and its methodologies. Data Think has successfully organized three summer and winter schools to date.

Dr. Negueruela del Castillo has substantial experience in curating and coordinating academic conferences and symposia, including the upcoming ‘Digital Double 2024’ in Rome, the ‘2021 Deep City International Symposium’ in Lausanne, and the ‘Scaffolds-Open Encounters’ in 2018 in Brussels. His extensive publication record includes a recent paper assessing the influence of artificial intelligence on urban studies in 2023. Among his current collaborations, Dr. Negueruela del Castillo organizes with Julio Paulos of ETH Future Cities Laboratory the symposium and edited volume “Digital Double- AI & Cities: Situating and Troubling AI Technologies for Architectural De/Reconstruction and Urban Simulation.” Furthermore, he curates with Nuria Rodriguez Ortega from the University of Málaga a symposium and a research network focused on Generative Curation for the Fall of 2024. He is also working with Geoff Cox from the Center for the Study of the Networked Image on a project titled “Diagramming Diagramming,”.

He is the editor of the volume “From Hype to Reality: Artificial Intelligence in the Study of Art and Culture,” co-edited with Eva Cetinic and published by Hertziana Studies in Art History.

Selection of relevant publications and conference activity:

Peer-reviewed Book Chapters (selection)

  • Forthcoming: Darío Negueruela, “The Reverse Gaze of Satellite Imaging. The reconstituted face of the earth”. In ‘Aerial Spatial Revolution in architecture and urbanism’. Matteo Vegetti and Christoph Frank (Eds.) 2023.
  • Dieter Dietz, Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Julien Lafontaine Carboni, Agathe Mignon, “HOUSE 1 as Scaffolding and Protostructure. Wood Collaborative Design and Construction in First Year Studio Teaching at EPFL”. In Fabio Bianconi, Marco Filippucci (Eds.) Digital Wood Construction. Innovative Techniques of Representation in Architectural Design (2019). Springer International Publishing.
  • Darío Negueruela del Castillo, “Space as Sense-Making Capacity” In Bühlmann, Savic Doyle (Eds.) The Ghost of Transparency. Architectonics of Communication (2019) Birkhäuser / De Gruyter.

Book Chapters

  • Darío Negueruela del Castillo, “Architecture for Alterity” In Huang, J. Ortner, P. and Doumpioti, C. (Eds.) Xixinan. The Rural Return (2018) pp- 239-245. Lausanne: EPFL, ISBN: 9782839925099.
  • Dieter Dietz, Aurélie Dupuis, Lafontaine Carboni & Darío Negueruela del Castillo, “Reapprendre l’espace public” in Coen, L. (Ed) Replay Malley. Animer la friche (2018) pp 170-180. Lausanne: InFolio. ISBN: 9782884744768.

Articles in Peer-Review Journals

  • Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Iacopo Neri, Pepe Ballesteros, Valentine Bernasconi, Ludovica Schaerf. (2023). “New Directions May Emerge: AI Curation of Helsinki’s Cultural Landscape.” In Olivér Horváth (Ed.) Designing Digital Humanities, Disegno Journal, Fall 2023. ISSN 2416-156X.
  • Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Aurélie Dupuis, Julien Lafontaine Carboni, Dieter Dietz. “Imagining with and in Space: Structural support as a cognitive device in architectural education” In James Thompson (Ed.) Flipping the Script: Foregrounding the Architecture Student – Charrette, Journal of the Association of Architectural Educators. 6(1) January 2020. Peer-reviewed Conference Proceedings (full paper, selection)
  • Dario Negueruela del Castillo, Iacopo Neri, Paul Guhennec, Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, Ludovica Schaerf, Valentine Bernasconi, and Pepe Ballesteros Zapata. (2023). “Transhistorical Urban Landscape as Hypermap.” In ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. link
  • Bernasconi, Valentine, Negueruela del Castillo, Darío. “Pose Annotation Project for Artworks: A participatory annotation platform for automated body pose estimation in art”, In Baillot, Anne, Tasovac, Toma, Scholger, Walter, & Vogeler, Georg. (2023, July 1). Digital Humanities 2023: Book of Abstracts. Digital Humanities 2023. Collaboration as Opportunity. (DH2023), Graz, Austria; p. 169. link
  • Dieter Dietz, Aurélie Dupuis, Julien Lafontaine Carboni & Darío Negueruela Del Castillo. (2019). “A Performative Threshold Between Teaching, Research and Practice. Atlas Poliphilo as Scaffold.” In The Teaching of Practice the Practice of Teaching: The Teacher’s Hunch. Proceedings of the 2019 ACSA/EAAE Conference, June 2019 Antwerp. link