DEEP CITY

Year: 2019

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Team: Guvenc Ozel, Benjamin Ennemoser, Tyson Philips, Sarah Kim

Initially exhibited at the Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair with international technology company Vodafone’s sponsorship, Deep City is an immersive environment where the audience experiences algorithmic and optical modes of surveillance and control in contemporary urban environments. The work allows the audience to occupy a fictitious space between the mind and the body of machines where artificial intelligence and robotics intersect.

The work is based on the creation of a surveillance database consisting of four world cities with different socioeconomic, demographic, architectural and urbanistic identities: Istanbul, Hong Kong, Rome and New York. Hours of drone footage, CCTV videos, animated 3D models, maps and other visual data from these cities are used to train deep-learning algorithms to generate a “meta-city,” a fictional urban environment that is the resultant of how AI perceives and interprets the various urban characteristics in its dataset. The images created by this AI are then composited into a continuous video and projected in a panoramic configuration to the walls, immersing the audience in an artificial urban environment envisioned by machines. Working in synchronization with the video, a mirrored sculptural object with various reflective and optical properties is actuated by an industrial robot in an orbital trajectory. Positioned between the projection and the robot, the audience can see their own reflection on the moving sculpture; altered, distorted and composited into the synthetic landscapes of the “Deep City.” Through this spatial setup, the project allows for developing speculative and experiential approaches toward seeing our cities as machines do in the world of surveillance capitalism.