A WALLED CITY

Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

 

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Installations
Electronic Language International Festival

 

A Walled City – China / United States

A Walled City is an interactive AI installation that transforms personal and collective visual memories into a decentralized city. Grounded in the spatial logic, zoning, and aesthetics of the historical Kowloon Walled City (Hongkong), a self-built hyper-dense enclave that grew in a legal and political void from the 1950s to 1993, the work builds a multi-agent AI system to turn participant-uploaded images into architectural chambers, forming a living structure where data, memory and history converge.

BIO

Weidi Zhang is a new media artist and designer based in Los Angeles and Phoenix. She is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Immersive Experience Design at the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center at Arizona State University.

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.