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 (Hong Kong), 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 world-building of future settlement. About the artist: Dr. Weidi Zhang is a new media artist based in Los Angeles and Phoenix. She is an Assistant Professor at the Media and Immersive eXperience Center of Arizona State University. Her research investigates speculative assemblages at the intersection of immersive media, data visualization, and AI art. Her works are featured in international awards, conferences, and museums, such as Best In Show Awards in SIGGRAPH, Red Dot Design Award, A' Design Award, Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica, Lumen Prize Shortlist, ISEA International, V2_Lab, Times Art Museum, Mutek, and others. She holds her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Jieliang (Rodger) Luo is the CEO and Chief Scientist at Minus AI, a Singapore-based, research-driven startup focused on leveraging AI technology to empower the creative industry. The company develops AI tools to enhance creative processes and complete work more effectively. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has previously served as a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Autodesk AI Lab in San Francisco.