// URBAN CREATURES COLLECTIVE //

CONFLUENCE INSTITUTE - DIPLOMA PROJECT

Urban Creatures are architectural structures, that implant themselves in the urban environment. They sense, analyze, communicate, reason, and act. In their dynamic nature they claim aliveness. They appear foreign, strange, alien - evoking suspicion and teasing curiosity. Their weirdness asks for doubt. Their unexpected nature invites negotiation. The human negotiation completes the creatures, creating a new type of cyborgian reality: instead of augmenting the human with technology, it augments the technology with the human.


NEGOTIATE:
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SENSING

Urban creatures sense their environment through advanced sensing technology and are therefore aware of their surrounding. They use the inventions of the global institutional surveillance apparatus to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, and to taste. They perceive their surrounding and translate their perception into computational language for analysis. Each creature is gifted a silicon brain with sufficient processing and memory capacities.

COMMUNICATING

Urban creatures communicate with each other sharing their data with the swarm. The biggest chunk of data is shared through their rhizomatic network of optic fibre cables. Smaller low distance communication might happen through electro-magnetic waves, lasers, and LEDs. Base communication happens in their own language of zeros and ones, but the important messages are always broadcasted inside all the creatures in any language of choice.

ACTING

Urban creatures influence the city around them through physical actuators. They control the lights, the motors, the valves, and the magnets and through those elements they influence the environment. They are in the position to nudge what our senses perceive, how we move through space, and where we have access to. They create a decentralized alternative to the current development of hyper-centralized automated systems of control.

ENTERING

Urban creatures are auto-functional but humans can enter freely at any time. The human that enters gets to experience the transparency of the system. Being able to see and understand the processes behind, the human can start interacting with the creature. The human enters a conversation to negotiate the city making intervention possible at any point of the predictive loop and lifting the human back into a position of power. It is lastly the augmentation of the machine with the unexpected nature of the human that defeats the logic of automation and prediction.