Fabrizio Gay and Irene Cazzaro awarded for “The artificial drawing of a vegetal Venice. Hybrid generative AI models for the Venice lagoon”

The paper “The artificial drawing of a vegetal Venice. Hybrid generative AI models for the Venice lagoon”, by Fabrizio Gay and Irene Cazzaro of the research unit ADA – Artificial Drawing & Design Aesthetics at Università Iuav di Venezia, received the Best Paper award at the 47th International Conference of Lecturers in the Disciplines of Representation, “Furious drawing”, organised by the University of Ferrara and the Unione Italiana per il Disegno (Italian Union for Drawing) from 10 to 12 September 2026.

The research by Fabrizio Gay and Irene Cazzaro investigates the use of hybrid generative artificial intelligence models to imagine and assess possible transformations of the vegetal landscape of the Venetian lagoon. Generative AI is integrated with data and models relating to environmental conditions such as tides, salinity, microclimate, soil and historical-landscape constraints, with the aim of producing design scenarios that can be compared and verified.

The project, developed within the Iuav research unit ADA – Artificial Drawing & Design Aesthetics, thus puts forward a conception of “artificial drawing” in which representation does not coincide with the mere production of images, but becomes a tool for knowledge, simulation and comparison between different design possibilities. Venice and its lagoon are taken as a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of relationship between design imagination, artificial intelligence and ecological-environmental processes.