Join speculative architect Liam Young and an all-seeing smart city operating system as they take a tour in a driverless taxi through a network of software systems, autonomous infrastructures, ghost architectures, anomalies, glitches, and sprites, searching for the wilds beyond the machine. This performance is an audio-visual expedition to a city found somewhere between the present and the predicted, the real and the imagined, stitched together from fragments of real landscapes and designed urban fictions. Set in the Chinese-owned and -controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using laser scanners, the film presents this near-future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it.

Commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices/Chicago Architecture Biennial and reimagined for transmediale/conversationpiece, Hello, City! is a live performance of Where the City Can’t See, the world’s first fiction film made entirely from data (directed by Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan).

This event marks the kick-off of the transmediale Co-Curricular program and will be introduced by Daphne Dragona, the program curator. With Hello City!, the program explores how speculative urbanism can empower our understanding of the role of ubiquitous and networked infrastructures in the present and future urban life. transmediale visitors are invited to also experience Young’s work through the initiative of Public Art Lab, where his dystopian cityscapes will be screened at Collegium Hungaricum Berlin from 2-7 February 2016.

transmediale Co-Curricular is carried out in cooperation with Allianz Kulturstiftung.