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
Neural Cityscapes is a media installation comprising eight synchronized video compositions, displayed across custom-fabricated architectural pillars equipped with embedded media screens. Each screen functions as a temporal viewport into a generative audiovisual narrative that explores speculative urban imaginaries. Developed through AI-based video synthesis, the project unfolds a series of city-like visions, oscillating between the plausible and the surreal. A multichannel ambient sound composition by Frankfurt Helmet (Shanghai) accompanies the visual sequence, further immersing the viewer in the evolving atmospheric landscape.
What appears on screen is not documentation of cities as they are, but cities as they are hallucinated by neural networks—trained on fragments of urban data and pushed beyond indexical representation into latent visual invention. These generated environments often present a paradox: though they lack referential anchors to specific geographies, they nonetheless register as emotionally and architecturally convincing. This paradox is central to the work’s conceptual concern: the capacity of generative systems to inform, redirect, and ultimately inhabit our collective imagination.
The installation foregrounds the idea that generative AI, far from being a neutral tool, actively produces epistemological artifacts—images that shape perception even as they deviate from empirical reality. In this sense, Neural Cityscapes stages a confrontation with what Jean Baudrillard termed hyperreality, a condition in which simulations displace and precede the real. The hallucinatory quality of the imagery resonates with Vilém Flusser’s critique of technical images as self-generating surfaces that no longer refer back to external reality, but rather to other images and codes.
Through the structure of the installation, the work proposes a model of aesthetic experience grounded in synthetic vision. The cities unfold in continuous metamorphosis: skylines drift, structures liquefy, perspectives dissolve. These transformations mirror not only the generative capacity of the machine but the volatility of perception itself, a condition media theorist Marshall McLuhan described as shaped by the extensions of our own nervous systems. If cities once grounded us in spatial stability and social order, Neural Cityscapes suggests that contemporary urban imaginaries are now authored within algorithmic and distributed processes.
What is at stake here is not simply a question of style or visual effect, but of consciousness formation. The work asks how machinic hallucinations—automatically produced and infinitely variable—become part of our cultural interiority. These synthetic cities, though unreal, leave a trace: they accumulate in memory, influence visual expectations, and become part of the mental architecture through which the real is navigated.
In an age increasingly defined by synthetic mediation, Neural Cityscapes asserts that imagination itself is now co-authored by machines. The project thus offers not a forecast of future urbanism, but a critical lens on the present condition of seeing, remembering, and dreaming in the era of generative visual culture.
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