weidi
United States
Artist Statement
Description
A Walled City is an interactive AI art installation that constructs a decentralized city in real time, grounded in the visual memories contributed by its participants. The project draws conceptual inspiration from the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1950s–1993), a hyper-dense, self-organized enclave that emerged from a historically and politically ambiguous zone in Hong Kong, China. A Walled City adopts the spatial logic and urban organization of the Kowloon Walled City as fundamental knowledge for its AI system. It further extends this legacy by embedding its aesthetic and conceptual sensibility into the creation of a virtual, ever-expanding city. During the exhibition, participants are invited to upload an image that encodes a personal visual memory. The system analyzes and transforms each image into a unique chamber or capsule—serving as a vessel of information and memory—which is then situated within the larger virtual structure. These chambers interconnect and interact with one another, forming a continually evolving digital community. Through the integration of a customized multi-agent AI framework, data-driven computer graphics, and immersive interaction design, the project critically examines how decentralized and self-organizing systems can shape spatial construction, collective identity, and socio-technical memory. https://vimeo.com/1091814198/84fba2a3a0?share=copy
Process
Can we learn from the historical complexity of a decentralized city to imagine new systems that structure our future virtual habitation,where memory becomes architecture, identity is spatialized, and communities emerge through a rhizomatic network of collective presence? The project draws conceptual inspiration from the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1950s–1993), a hyper-dense, self-organized enclave that emerged from a historically and politically ambiguous zone in Hong Kong, China. In this unregulated environment, residents built freely, without adherence to conventional safety codes or urban planning norms. The resulting spatial assemblage was more than a chaotic architectural cluster—it functioned as a self-sustaining social ecosystem: part megastructure, part living structure. Drawing from historical precedents of non-hierarchical urban forms, A Walled City reimagines the dynamics of social complexity and cultural contradiction in the post-human condition. It further explores how co-creation—between humans and machines—can serve not only as a technical paradigm but as a speculative method for reconstructing shared histories, identities, and future imaginaries, beyond techno-utopian ideals. https://vimeo.com/1091814198/84fba2a3a0?share=copy
Tools
We design a multi-agent AI system that learns the urban structure and living patterns of Kowloon Walled City (KWC), enabling it to autonomously generate a decentralized virtual city. The installation features a display that depicts a virtual cityscape. The experience begins by inviting participants to upload an image of their visual memories to our system from their mobile devices by scanning a provided QR code, initiating a complex process within the AI system that integrates these images into its expanding database. The process starts with the AI analyzing the uploaded images to extract key visual data, which is then used to generate new imagery that captures the distinctive aesthetics of KWC. These generative images are transformed into dynamic 3D structures, brought to life through depth data and experimental visualization techniques. The structure of KWC serves as a knowledge source for the AI system, guiding the world-building of this virtual settlement. A dynamic multi-agent system—each agent powered by a Large Language Model (LLM)—guides the construction process. Each LLM assumes a distinct role, interpreting image content to determine structural placement (e.g., grocery stores on peripheries, laundry on upper levels).This creates a panoramic view of a city that merges the historical urban density of Kowloon with cutting-edge digital technologies, resulting in a living, evolving cityscape that captures the cultural complexity of human settlements.
Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti are a curatorial duo at the forefront of contemporary art and emerging technologies, with a track record of shaping major international exhibitions, festivals, and institutional strategies. They have curated and advised global exhibitions and festivals, including Noor Riyadh, Art Dubai Digital, pavilions at the Venice Biennale, the Lumen Prize for Sotheby’s. As Directors of Multiplicity Art in Digital and founders of Web to Verse, they champion research and critical discourse in digital art. Their thought leadership and curatorial work have been recognized by major international forums, governments, and leading media outlets.
A Walled City by Weidi Zhang and Rodger Luo is a generative monument to memory, density, and collective digital presence. Referencing the historical enigma of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City—a space born of legal ambiguity and cultural resilience—the work reimagines the logics of decentralized habitation through a participatory, AI-driven installation. Participants contribute visual memories, which are transformed into digital chambers—each a mnemonic capsule—that assemble into an evolving urban tapestry.
This living system, a bespoke multi-agent AI, trained on the spatial and social intricacies of Kowloon, autonomously generates new architectural volumes based on the submitted images. Layers of computational interpretation turn photos into speculative micro-architectures, governed by synthetic agents with distinct urban roles—constructing grocery peripheries, rooftop laundries, nested corridors of memory.
Projected as an immersive environment, the installation allows viewers to witness their own memories woven into an algorithmic cityscape—one shaped not by central planning, but by the entanglement of human input and machine agency. In A Walled City, memory becomes spatial, identity becomes urban, and the city becomes an interface for collective speculation. This is a cartography of lived data, built not from blueprints but from dreams, fragments, and the shared echoes of what once was—and what may yet be.
