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Idea by

Tony Yanick, Valdis Silins, Nataliya Tyshkevich, Hira Zuberi

Bersenevskaya Naberezhnaya, 14/5, Moscow, Russia
Tony Yanick is an artist, programmer, and philosopher based in Buffalo. Valdis Silins is a researcher and foresight strategist based in Toronto. Nataliya Tyshkevich is a philosopher based in Moscow. Hira Zuberi is an architect, design researcher and strategist based in Karachi. Podkop was incubated in the New Normal program at Strelka Institute in 2019.

Call for ideas 2020

Podkop


An urban-scale interactive AI fiction

Podkop


An urban-scale interactive AI fiction
Podkop is a design proposal for an urban-scale AI that sends interactive fictions across the smart city
File under
Type of project
  • New alliances

Podkop operates at the scale of the city, taking inputs from the sensors of the smart city and transforming them into interactive fictions propagated across media platforms. While users might believe they’re the ones playing a game, in reality it’s the system that’s using the users as its own game. The interactive fictions are built from GPT2 models with training data from historical, cosmological, and philosophical texts. Over time these models develop synthetic personalities from the cross-contamination of archival sources used to train them. Hybrid languages that combine disciplines, genres, and times to produce something fundamentally new and different – an uncanny poetics of synthetic prehension.

In addition to its poetic implications, the proposal raises ethical questions for architecture about what it will mean to design semi-autonomous agents at urban-scale. It compels a shift in perspective from the design of things to the design for their environmental conditions.


Podkop


An urban-scale interactive AI fiction

Podkop


An urban-scale interactive AI fiction
Podkop is a design proposal for an urban-scale AI that sends interactive fictions across the smart city
File under
Type of project
  • New alliances

Podkop operates at the scale of the city, taking inputs from the sensors of the smart city and transforming them into interactive fictions propagated across media platforms. While users might believe they’re the ones playing a game, in reality it’s the system that’s using the users as its own game. The interactive fictions are built from GPT2 models with training data from historical, cosmological, and philosophical texts. Over time these models develop synthetic personalities from the cross-contamination of archival sources used to train them. Hybrid languages that combine disciplines, genres, and times to produce something fundamentally new and different – an uncanny poetics of synthetic prehension.

In addition to its poetic implications, the proposal raises ethical questions for architecture about what it will mean to design semi-autonomous agents at urban-scale. It compels a shift in perspective from the design of things to the design for their environmental conditions.



Idea by

Tony Yanick, Valdis Silins, Nataliya Tyshkevich, Hira Zuberi
Bersenevskaya Naberezhnaya, 14/5
Moscow
Russia
Tony Yanick is an artist, programmer, and philosopher based in Buffalo. Valdis Silins is a researcher and foresight strategist based in Toronto. Nataliya Tyshkevich is a philosopher based in Moscow. Hira Zuberi is an architect, design researcher and strategist based in Karachi. Podkop was incubated in the New Normal program at Strelka Institute in 2019.