21st century: a machine age.

 

Inspired by Trevor Paglen’s invisible images, the project focuses on the current extraordinary time-frame where the relationship between the sentience and the autonomous become ambiguous. It starts in a machine era when society is marching towards the fourth industrial revolution. 

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“The City of Tomorrow” written by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel points out the core question of this project - cities had been evolved for thousand years, but in a linear form. Nonetheless, the presence of digital layers will inevitably bring radical changes to our cities. Ratti and Claudel call it futurecraft, a new approach to envisioning cities. Everyone on planet Earth, professionals or the public, are contributing and in control of shaping our future; with machine’s assistance. Yet, in what form of human-machine collaboration do we need to achieve our dream?

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With that, the project questions the future of the built environment with the omnipresence of autonomous agents such as self-driving cars and home robots. It is a 50-year operation origin from the Architecture Experiment Lab, which carries out deep data analysis and experiments on the current built environment. New forms of the built environment will be generated under the collaboration of human and machine. However, it also questions the level of consciousness involved in machine techniques; and how or when shall human designers be involved in the process. Setting at the Fenland, it will be the ideal site for the experimental events due to its abundance of natural energy resources, vastness and nakedness in technology. At the hinterland, the operation provides a real-life safe site that allows the autonomous agents to learn and analyse the surrounding. Lastly, the site will become a safe place for the inhabitation of both sentience and autonomous agents over a three phases blueprint. 

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However, the operation promises that humans will continue to lead planet Earth with the aid of artificial intelligence and machines.

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