Cities of the future

Liam Young's Seoul City Machine is a 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 – an urban space in which machines and technology are the dominant inhabitants. The film is an abstract sequence of a future Seoul where the hopes, dreams, fears and wonders of emerging technologies have come true. The present-day city is overlaid with cinematic visual effects to depict an autonomous world of machines, in which everyone is connected to everything.

Nostalgia Machines: Point Cloud Architecture is inspired by Zhang Mahler's 3D film of the same name, which explores how the Asian metropolis is instrumentalised by dystopian sci-fi narratives of the West, and how these techno-orientalist narratives obscure the realities of technological progress in Asia. The sculpture has been created with visual structure from motion (visual SFM) software that extracts point cloud data from thousands of frames of Chinese architecture, which are in turn sourced from online search engines. Sci-fi 3D assets are then assigned to each point in the cloud, resulting in a unique, speculative architecture, rather than the usual homogeneity of global urbanism.