Neural Cityscapes

Hyperreality and The Collective Imagination

Commissioned artwork, TANK Shanghai (CN)

Media installation, eight-channel 4K 60fps video, stereo audio, cement & iron pillars
2023

Neural Cityscapes is a media installation that offers the audience an audiovisual journey into animated city snapshots that have been produced with artificial means. Eight media screens, arranged on custom-built architectural pillars, serve as portals to a series of video compositions that reveal a mosaic of fictional landscapes, meticulously woven together using custom-built software. The work is accompanied by a sound layer, designed by the Shanghai-based duo Frankfurt Helmet, and it attempts to enhance the visual narratives with a mesmerizing electric ambiance.

Through the lenses of the machine, we submerge into a pool of generative spaces, that, despite their artificial origins, their existence becomes real. As it has been discussed in the past by media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, and Vilém Flusser, the hyperreality the medium constructs defines our behavior, experience, and memories. The understanding of our surrounding world is now being shaped by synthetic aesthetics that twist and alter our perception in a similar manner these animations depict architectural structures to transform continuously into fluid states. Our surrounding spaces, architectures, and cities are now being challenged through the infinite formations that latent spaces produce. The new imageries now reside within the observer’s mind and seamlessly meld into our collective imagination.

Machine hallucinations direct our collective imagination
机器幻觉引导我们的集体想象

Acknowledgments

The work has been exhibited in Synthetic Cities.
Creation & Production： Stavros Didakis
Sound Design: Frankfurt Helmet
VFX Mix: Benny
Production Coordinator： Huijun Guan
LED Equipment： Leyard | Linso LED
Co-Funded： West Bund Group