After the publication of Atlas of Forms, in 2017, followed by the first four volumes of Atlas des Régions Naturelles, The Third Atlas forms part of a trilogy that revolves as much around architecture, broadly defined, as it does around images in their various modes of production and distribution. Whereas Atlas of Forms used the Internet as its primary source and ARN explores local realities in contemporary France, The Third Atlas proposes experimentation with artificial intelligence as a tool for representing the real.

In the form of a dystopian fable depicting the world after the rise of AI, The Third Atlas moves beyond the astonishment or dismissal that these new images provoke, to reflect on how artificial intelligence is reshaping our ways of seeing. It goes on to postulate that this shifted vision will pattern not only forms of architecture to come, but equally those of design, sculpture and painting, perhaps even more so than those of photography.

Delving into the intricacies of Midjourney involved more than a thousand hours of work to create the 660 images in the 320 pages of this book, one of the first of such significance to be devised entirely with the use of artificial intelligence.