Description of project by Sonja Berthold and Dietmar Leyk
Mutualities is a collaboration between humans and algorithms. The exhibition explores the future of cities and our relationship to AI and is curated by Dr. Sonja Berthold and Dietmar Leyk of LAAS and SPACECOUNCIL, opening May 20 at the Spazio Rava Palazzo in Venice as part of the official collateral events at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Mutualities explores the interactions between people, nature, and digital technology within our shared urban spaces. Operating within the emerging field of Neurourbanism, Mutualities asks: what do we share, who do we share it with, and where does this exchange take place or, how do we live together?
The experimental exhibition is composed of large-scale, immersive video and audio projections that expand the material boundaries of the gallery into virtual space. It showcases 12 future scenarios where humans and AI interact. Each space is familiar—a street, a courtyard, a dining room—yet radically altered; quieter, smarter, adaptive, autonomous, and self-learning.
Mutualties prefigures such a space: infrared technology, AI, and algorithms track and respond to visitors’ proximity, gestures, and movement to create a unique sequence of videos tailored to each viewer. The empathic space uses AI algorithms to learn from, and grow with, the visitor; a “smart” exhibition that gets smarter over the course of its six month existence. In this way, the viewer becomes an active participant/conspirator with the technology, transforming the exhibition into a resonant body of subtle calls and responses.
The show encourages a broader understanding of human values and develops an explicit connection between the analogue and the digital, between the architect, the urbanist, the scientist and the citizen— stakeholders in our urban ecology engaged in shaping our future cities, villages and landscapes.
“We are in the midst of concurrent transformations, like the generation who lived through the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. Significant changes that impact our lives can be found in the transitions from personalised control over devices to automation through machines, from a three-stage life trajectory to multi-stage lives, and from linear to circular economies. We will all experience profound developments in how we work and educate ourselves, when and with whom we decide to settle down and have children and who and how we meet in common spaces.”
Sonja Berthold and Dietmar Leyk
