A DIALOGUE ABOUT “DïaloG”

Collaborative project MindSpaces & MindSpaces HK / CityUHK

This conversation is a dialogue about DïaloG, which is an urban media art installation that is currently being developed as a collaborative research between MindSpaces & MindSpaces HK / CityUHK, under the EU S+T+Arts program.

DïaloG is co-created by Maurice Benayoun (MoBen/CityU HK) and Refik Anadol (AnalogNative). In the public space (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain) two “living” entities face each other. They don’t look like the living beings we know. They don’t speak any language we know. They are aliens, strangers, immigrants. Facing each other they gradually mutate. They seem to react to their environment. Even more, they are clearly, and desperately, trying to understand each other. In the context of the social diversity of L’Hospitalet, the second city of Catalunya and a popular suburb of Barcelona, DïaloG reflects on the difficulty of building a mutual understanding beyond social and cultural differences. The real-time generated creatures have behaviours and appearance affected through AI by their cultural background, their environment and what they perceive from the “locals” that interfere with their attempt to communicate and understand each other.

On the Thessaloniki and HK Gardens channels, we’ll connect these “living” entities online under the moniker “Alien life in the Telescope”, and observe them growing before this “encounter of the 4th kind” as prelude to the two strangers actually meeting face-to-face in their full hardware bodies. From Refik Anadol’s studio in Los Angeles, and Maurice Benayoun’s Neuro Design Lab in CityU Hong Kong we’ll see them growing, moving, and expressing their conditions and their desires. DïaloG uses technologies developed by MindSpaces partners to allow a large spectrum of perceptive features that, combined with R. Anadol and M. Benayoun graphic generators and AI algorithms, create this empathic de-alienation.

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CREDITS:
Director: Maurice BENAYOUN and Refik ANADOL
Project manager: Moben and Analog Native
Contributors: partners of the MindSpaces EU research project & the MindSpaces HK project
HK Production: Charlie YIP, NeuroDesign Lab, ACIM, SCM
Location: Los Angeles, Hong Kong