Shown here at Heinz Nixdorf Museum Germany (HNF). Size 110 square metres in matrix shape.

The Nemesis Machine: Manifestation.

From Metropolis to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis.

This multi-layered art installation explores data ownership, surveillance, real-time space, and urban systems through a speculative, systems-based metaphor. Positioned between utopian promise and dystopian dysfunction, the artwork examines technology as both emancipatory and coercive. It proposes a machine that appears to liberate through openness, connectivity, and efficiency, while simultaneously rendering users complicit in structures of monitoring and control. By default, individuals become data—harvested, analyzed, and repurposed—within a global surveillance apparatus that blurs agency, consent, and autonomy.

At its core, the artwork interrogates how emerging technologies reshape our relationship to space, governance, and observation. It imagines a cybernetic city: a self-regulating metropolis whose intelligence is entirely driven by data flows and networked interactions. This city exists as a physical avatar of real-world systems, continuously animated by live inputs from sensors, networks, and human presence. Cause and effect unfold visibly as external events generate internal transformations, producing a parallel reality that mirrors, interprets, and amplifies the world beyond the gallery.

The installation raises critical questions about ethics, control, and visibility: What does it mean to inhabit a space where every movement is tracked? Can smart systems empower collective life, or do they entrench new borders and asymmetries? Utopian or dystopian, the city performs our present—and possible futures—through data made tangible.

The installation uses thousands of real-time data streams which are being processed by unsupervised machine learning (AI). The artwork comes alive to represent the real-time agency of the environment as an observed living system. This is the largest and most complex version made to date and was customized to the space in terms of its physical appearance and a new software interface for data inputs.

The Nemesis Machine is an ever-evolving artwork, always different and always expanding. The artwork shown here is 110 metres square. (there are various sizes that can be exhibited). The complexity of the artwork is incorporated into the real-time social agency of our environment to create an avatar city of bits. This is augmented by several layers that might not appear initially evident as you unpack this multi-disciplinary artwork. The outcome incorporates AI and unsupervised machine learning and questions how will artificial intelligence affect the governance of the city in the future

It has many internal living systems including:- The main feature links to smart city networks and real-time data feeds shown here from all across Germany incorporating 250 pollution data feeds, 3000 weather data points, and 2500 real-time transport data feeds. There is also three sensor networks inside the artwork in the gallery, a facial recognition embedding the audience in the structure, news feeds, Twitter feeds, and financial data, as well as a custom IOT mote sensor network.

The artwork also further embeds the audience as units of data as actual performers by tracking them in the gallery and in the city and incorporating these data into the experience. This real-time cybernetic artwork demonstrates clearly how we complicitly use our technologies in social space at all times in this bigger machine. The artwork not only contributes to a field of practice I call panoptic aesthetics but is now performative on a global scale since we are all now units of data being parsed by the machine. Thus the Nemesis Machine is a spectacle in the literal sense and also in its more overt sense in that it is an object of how we experience the world around us.

The exhibition also has 24 other artworks including:

Velocity. The artwork becomes a real-time collective performance and the technology highlights how separate and stacked informational layers can be threaded to be made visible as an interwoven and entangled universe that has no borders. The artwork speculates of a future of shared data. https://velocity.stanza.co.uk/

Living Systems. A dynamic generative artwork using transport, weather, pollution data in Germany made using a newly created real time API with unsupervised machine learning process built in. Neural networks (adaptive resonance ART) recreates patterns inside data from across the whole of the country. The artwork shows how our city data is alive and how we form these systems by our own design. https://stanza.co.uk/livingsystems/index.html

Running Out Of Time. This artwork is an eco visualisation that questions the reality of how we are polluting our cities and our environment. As we increasingly pollute the air with our behaviors, other systems and networks become evident.  https://stanza.co.uk/Thinair/index.html

Toxicity. Artwork eco visualisation scanning pollution data feeds with a machine learning system built in to represent the agency of the invisible city. In this case made to look like traffic in a city. https://stanza.co.uk/toxicity/index.html

Living Landscapes. This series of artworks raise several questions about the fluid liquid real time data space that now surrounds and envelops us everywhere. Who owns the data, who does this space belong to? What is the future of this technologically stacked interlocking mediated environment?  https://stanza.co.uk/livinglandscapes/index.html

Nemesis Machine.

Full project history see here. (http://stanza.co.uk/nemesis-machineweb/index.html)

See the exhibition in a 3d walk around : enter the password to view.

To experience in a 3 D walk around. Click on the image above then enter this password...... HNFnemesis1962

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EXHIBITION FEATURES. OVERVIEW

A modular installation and data based artwork series that open up conversation with the audience and gallery about future cities, the role of AI in society and real time data through the lens of art.  

The exhibition explores the future of cities governed by algorithms, creating data-driven co-creation systems that act as autonomous “consciousness,” monitoring the invisible city in real-time and generating new artworks through data visualisation. 

Expressive artworks investigate how the invisible city now empowers the visible world.

These installations are continuously transforming by analysing thousands of city-wide data inputs to make predictive outputs…an oracular vision of the near future.

Artworks merging various types of data using methods of artificial intelligence AI and ML learning to create new artistic scenarios using networked real-time information flows. 

The artworks act as a frame for the different expressions of data, which in effect make up a connected city and resonate between utopian and dystopian dialogues. 

Furthermore, the artworks demonstrate how we are complicit and thus entangled in the surveyed and monitored technological layers that the artworks are communicating and fit seamlessly into what Stanza calls panoptic aesthetics. 

Underpinning the project and exhibition is a series of pertinent queries. For example, by making visible the metaphysical interactions between humans and more-than-human information streams, what new narratives of our future cities and AI will be uncovered? The artistic outputs are informed by critical analysis of city data throughout. This information, together with learning through public participation, will coalesce to build artworks that metaphorically explore the invisible agency of AI across the country and the possible manifestations of its desires through machine learning patterns.

How would it be made visible to engage an audience? 

The project includes the representation of selected streams of citywide data focused in the museum or gallery, the city (ANY), the country (ANY) and across Europe.  The city data space becomes mirrored, turning the environment into an emergent generative artwork. Inside the machine learning system, neural networks will create patterns inside data to reform the invisible across the country. My own interfaces represent open data feeds via a platform facilitating the creation of the artworks. Real-time data streams will be interpreted through machine learning algorithms to align my concept of an artificially intelligent controlled environment, leading to the artworks, installations, software visualisation, and open-source data interface, which will be exhibited.

Questions embedded in the project: 

• Can a city be self-governing, making its own decisions based on open data mediated by machine learning? 

• How do citizens participate in this system to affect outcomes?

Technology Overview Softwares and CODE development.

• AI systems -  visualisations  ( THREE JS)

• AI input visitors data - APP ( C+) 

• AI news feeds area ( MAKE and OPEN AI into THREE js )

• Emergent City Data Feeds and API ( NODE JS   JSON) 

• Talking AI system ( ORACLE) ( MAX MSP  and eleven LABS)

• Velocity APP  ( C+ NODE js)  ) I phone  /Android

• Nemesis Display (XOJO C+)

• Emergent City Visualisation. (THREE JS)

• Other news feed  and CCTV AI ( SHOCKWAVE) 

• Electronics systems ( processing) 

• Face Tracking (5g network Linux XOJO)

• Soundcities. ( Java script interface backend database ) 

Technology Overview 

The main cybernetic artwork system leverages a custom-built real-time system (STANZA.API) , focused on data from across the Netherlands and European cities. Using unsupervised machine learning algorithms, Adaptive Resonance Theory 2 (ART 2).  The main Nemesis systems and databases adapt without losing previously acquired patterns. At its core, a neural network processes these data streams, forming recursive patterns—patterns within patterns—that reflect the complex systems of a nation. As data changes, new nodes emerge within the network, showing growth and transformation. These nodes are dynamically influenced by live weather feeds, pollution feeds and environmental inputs.

Data Systems  & Learning

• Backend: Node.js (STANZA.API), with the neural network ported from C to JavaScript.

• Learning Model: Adaptive Resonance Theory 2 (ART 2), supporting continual learning and behavioural clustering.

• Display: An active internet connection is required for real-time functionality. Three JS

• Output Format: JSON-based data visualisations.

Data Sources

• Weather: Nationwide metrics including temperature, wind speed/direction, precipitation, humidity, and pressure.

• Pollution: Real-time data per station (GPS), including Carbon Monoxide, Nitrous Oxide, Ozone, Sulphur Dioxide, Temperature, Wind, and Humidity.

Veloicity on of the other srtworks in the exhibition.

Other artworks in the exhibition by Stanza

Opening night 400 people at the receptiion.

Talking about the artwork at the opening

Can also be made with a path down the middle

Cn also be shown in daylight.

For more project information see here.

Available for exhibitions. Artwork by Stanza