A Walled City | Weidi

" In A Walled City, memory becomes spatial, identity becomes urban, and the city becomes an interface for collective speculation.

This is a cartography of lived data, built not from blueprints but from dreams, fragments, and the shared echoes of what once was—and what may yet be."

- Review by Auronda Scalera and Dr.Alfredo Cramerotti

A Walled City 2025

Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

Can we learn from the historical complexity of a decentralized city to imagine new systems that structure our future virtual habitation,where memory becomes architecture, identity is spatialized, and communities emerge through a rhizomatic network of collective presence?

Introduce A Walled City

A Walled City is an interactive AI installation that transforms personal and collective visual memories into a decentralized, evolving virtual 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 historical urban logic converge.

The project is not nostalgic; rather, it reflects on density, proximity, and how private fragments can be reassembled into shared space. Each contribution remains visible as itself, yet becomes part of a larger organism that accumulates, shifts, and evolves over time. In A Walled City, memory becomes architecture, identity is spatialized, and communities emerge through a rhizomatic network. The work connects AI systems with historical urban memory, turning contributions into forms and forms into relations, while raising the question of what is protected by “walls” and what is kept apart in the worldbuilding of future settlement.

《界外城》是一件互动式 AI 装置，通过将个人与集体的视觉记忆转化为一个去中心化、不断演化的虚拟城市展开。作品以香港历史上的九龙城寨为灵感。该城寨在 1950 年代至 1993 年间处于法律与政治的真空之中，由居民自建，形成高度密集的聚落。装置借用这一历史空间的逻辑、分区方式和美学特征，构建出一个多代理 AI 系统，将参与者提交的图像转化为建筑般的“房间”，从而形成一座由数据、记忆与历史城市逻辑交织而成的生命体。

这个项目的目的并非怀旧，而是借此反思密度、邻近性，以及私人片段如何被重新组合成共享空间。每一次提交在保持其自身可辨识性的同时，也成为更大有机体的一部分，使整体得以不断累积、变动并随时间演化。在《界外城》中，记忆化为建筑，身份通过空间被重新呈现，而共同体则在一张根状网络中逐渐浮现。作品将 AI 系统与历史性的城市记忆相连，使提交的内容转化为形体，并由形体生成关系，同时提出一个问题：在未来聚落的建构中，墙保护的究竟是什么，又把什么隔绝在外？

Teaser | A Walled City, 2025

" A Walled City by Weidi Zhang and Rodger Luo is a generative monument to memory, density, and collective digital presence. Referencing the historical enigma of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City—a space born of legal ambiguity and cultural resilience—the work reimagines the logics of decentralized habitation through a participatory, AI-driven installation. Participants contribute visual memories, which are transformed into digital chambers—each a mnemonic capsule—that assemble into an evolving urban tapestry.

This living system, a bespoke multi-agent AI, trained on the spatial and social intricacies of Kowloon, autonomously generates new architectural volumes based on the submitted images. Layers of computational interpretation turn photos into speculative micro-architectures, governed by synthetic agents with distinct urban roles—constructing grocery peripheries, rooftop laundries, nested corridors of memory. Projected as an immersive environment, the installation allows viewers to witness their own memories woven into an algorithmic cityscape—one shaped not by central planning, but by the entanglement of human input and machine agency. In A Walled City, memory becomes spatial, identity becomes urban, and the city becomes an interface for collective speculation. This is a cartography of lived data, built not from blueprints but from dreams, fragments, and the shared echoes of what once was—and what may yet be."

- Review by Auronda Scalera and Dr.Alfredo Cramerotti