What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT. If you are interested in taking part in the exhibition at UABB 2019, submit your proposal to the “Eyes of the City” Open Call by May 31st, 2019: www.eyesofthecity.net
Seoul City Machine is a city symphony from the urban landscape of tomorrow. Narrated and scripted by an AI chatbot trained on smart city data sets the film is a love letter from the City Operating System to the citizens it affectionately manages. The film is a portrait of a city where machines and technology are now the dominant inhabitants of space. Here the eyes of the city are numerous and we are endlessly scanned by its countless sensors, lasers, cameras and satellites in order to feed the data models and optimize our experience. Our guide to the city is the disembodied voice of its urban management software. The script and dialogue have been generated through a conversation with a real artificially intelligent chatbot. We listen as the city machine voices its own creation story and introduces itself to its citizens.
The film is an abstract sequence of vignettes, fragments and moments of a future Seoul, a city in which all of the hopes and dreams, fears and wonders of emerging technologies have come true. Using contemporary Seoul as a visual backdrop the present-day city is overlaid with cinematic visual effects to depict an autonomous world of machines where the sky is filled with drones, cars are driverless, the street is draped in augmented reality and everyone is connected to everything.
