Live Date:

Los Angeles: 9 am, Monday, September 15, 2025 (PDT, UTC–7)
CEST: 6 pm, Monday, September 15, 2025 (CEST, UTC+2)
Doha: 7 pm, Monday, September 15, 2025 (AST, UTC+3)
Singapore: 12 am (midnight), Tuesday, September 16, 2025 (SGT, UTC+8)

on Instagram.
via Restream (we will send the link via mail, approximately 30 minutes before the call)

Outline

1. Intro (Mike Brauner)

• -  Welcome everyone.

• -  Introduce Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti (curatorial duo, jury members).

• -  Introduce Weidi Zhang (new media artist, Los Angeles) and Rodger Luo (Minus AI, Singapore).

• -  Short note on the Golden Ticket: each jury member selects one piece that moved them personally,

  accompanied by an essay.

  2. Opening: Auronda’s and Alfredo‘s Choice

• -  Mike invites Auronda and Alfredo: What first spoke to you in A Walled City?

• -  Reflection on Auronda’s and Alfredo‘s essay line: “memory becomes architecture, identity is

  spatialized, and communities emerge through a rhizomatic network.”

• -  When you first encountered it, did you experience it more as an artwork, or as a kind of system?

  3. Introducing Weidi and Rodger

• -  Mike invites Weidi and Rodger: Could you both introduce yourselves and tell us how this collaboration began?

• -  How did A Walled City emerge, and why did you choose Kowloon as a reference point?

• -  You come from different backgrounds: what did you discover in each other’s practice through

  working together?

4. Between History and Digital Translation, between Chaos and Order

• -  Weidi/Rodger: Kowloon Walled City was a unique place: dense, chaotic, self-organized. How did you translate that into an AI system?

• -  Weidi/Rodger: Do you try to keep the chaos, or does the technology inevitably bring order?

• -  Auronda/Alfredo: Does this tension between chaos and order also reflect how digital communities

  form today?

• -  To all: What can we learn from unregulated, organic urban growth for digital community building?

  5. Technology & Collective Memory

• -  Weidi/Rodger: Could you explain the multi-agent system.

• -  Weidi/Rodger: Each image that participants upload becomes a cell in the city. Do you see these as

  private memories placed side by side, or as something that merges into a collective body?

• -  To all: Is this city built by humans, or by machines interpreting human input or both together?

  6. Participation & Community Formation & Curatorial Meaning

• -  Auronda/Alfredo: When participants contribute their own images, are they building a city or are they becoming part of one?

• -  Auronda/Alfredo: What does it mean for personal memories to become public architecture?

• -  Auronda/Alfredo: What meaning do you see in transforming personal images into shared architecture: is it a metaphor, or could it also change how we think about curating and presenting art?

• -  Auronda/Alfredo: From a curatorial perspective, do you see A Walled City as a work that preserves history, or as one that creates new cultural memory in the moment?

  7. Wider Practice & Speculative Futures

• -  Weidi/Rodger: How does "A Walled City" connect to your broader artistic investigations?

• -  To all: Do you imagine this city as a monument looking back (preserving memory) or as a blueprint looking forward, toward possible ways of digital living?

  8. Closing & Community Questions

• -  Open floor for audience questions.

• -  Mike closes by thanking everyone.

Submission by Weidi Zhang and Rodger Luo

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.

Statement

Perception

Essay by Auronda Scalera and Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti A Walled City

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.