Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

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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?

Teaser | A Walled City, 2025

Introduce A Walled City

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A Walled City is an interactive AI art installation that constructs a decentralized city in real time, grounded in the visual memories contributed by its participants. The project draws conceptual inspiration from the now-demolished (1950s–1993) Kowloon Walled City, a hyper-dense, self-organized enclave that emerged from a historically and politically ambiguous zone in Hong Kong [1], where residents built autonomously, without adherence to formal safety codes or urban planning norms. The resulting spatial formation functioned as a self-sustaining social organism: part megastructure, part living community.

Building on this legacy, A Walled City poses the following design question: Can intelligent system 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?

A Walled City adopts the urban organization, aesthetic, and cultural influences of Kowloon Walled City as foundational knowledge for its AI. During the exhibition, participants are invited to upload images that encode personal visual memories. The system analyzes and transforms each image into a unique chamber—serving as a vessel of memory—which is then integrated as a building block within the broader structure. The AI system arranges chambers following the zoning and layout of Kowloon Walled City, forming an interconnected and continually evolving, rhizomatic network. Through the integration of a customized multi-agent AI system, experimental visualization, and interaction design, the project critically examines how decentralized and self-organizing systems can shape the spatial construction of collective identity and socio-technical memory.

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