ENTANGLED CITIES:

Entangled Cities envisions the city as a living, breathing organism of data and light. Drawing from air, movement, news, and real time data networks, the installation transforms invisible digital currents into generative forms that shift and evolve in real time. Through AI, the city learns, imagines, and responds—turning human and non-human activity into a choreography of patterns, revealing the hidden pulse of urban life and the emergent consciousness of algorithmic cities.

Entangled Cities investigates the evolving relationship between urban environments and the data systems that govern, represent, and mediate them. Through a series of expressive, generative artworks, the project explores how the invisible infrastructures of information—algorithms, sensors, and networks—are reshaping the visible, lived city.

In this work, the city is reimagined not simply as a physical space but as a dynamic, data-driven organism—an interdependent system in which human, machine, and environmental agencies continuously interact. As artificial intelligence and networked technologies become embedded in the fabric of urban experience, Entangled Cities invites reflection on how these new digital layers redefine access, privilege, and participation, and how they construct new borders between inclusion and exclusion.

The installation operates through live connections to hundreds of data streams, initially centred on Milan and later extendable to multiple cities across Europe. It draws from urban mobility systems, weather and pollution sensors, and global news feeds, all recomposed through custom neural networks. These systems generate continuously evolving visual and sonic patterns that respond to real-time data. AI-driven image and text manipulations speculate on political and social futures, transforming live news, environmental data, and visual archives into generative material.

Audience participation forms a vital layer of the work: photographs and GPS data submitted via a dedicated mobile application are absorbed into the installation’s live ecosystem, embedding each participant within its constantly transforming digital fabric. (optional part)

At the core of Entangled Cities lies a digital twin—a speculative avatar of the contemporary metropolis—constructed through the synthesis of environmental data, unsupervised machine learning, and generative AI. Air quality fluctuations, meteorological changes, and news events are continuously translated into a morphing choreography of image, movement, and sound.

The project also speculates on the future of algorithmic urbanism: cities governed by artificial intelligence, where data becomes both consciousness and creative force. Through data-driven systems that operate as autonomous intelligences, the work examines how AI might one day learn, decide, and create independently—monitoring the invisible city in real time and generating new artworks as a form of algorithmic expression.

These generative systems pose urgent questions: Will the cities of the future be self-governing, capable of making decisions through open data? Can artificial intelligence develop its own forms of desire, agency, and aesthetics? In Entangled Cities, AI becomes a speculative collaborator, translating air quality, mobility, social and network data into dynamic visual narratives that serve as metaphors for invisible urban agency.

Data, the defining medium of our era, is remade and reinterpreted by machine learning algorithms to construct alternate, parallel realities. AI art emerges from a constant remediation of human history through a computational lens—currently dependent on human archives, yet moving toward a self-perpetuating ecology of machine imagination. The AI flowers born from the seeds of human history grow into new, machinic desires—guiding us toward a future co-authored by technology and humanity. Ultimately, Entangled Cities proposes a new urban imaginary: one where artificial intelligence is not merely a tool of control, but a co-creator of meaning. It envisions a future domain where art, science, politics, and love converge within the evolving consciousness of the algorithmic city.

EXHIBITION: To be shown on a series multiple projectors or 3  to 6  screens to be discussed.

TECHNOLOGY: Software visualisations of the unsupervised machine learning system from Stanza API and online database have feeds providing data via machine learning to the artwork in real time.  

ALSO: includes an interpretation of the future of the city based on taking news feeds and images from the news in real time off the internet and then running AI prompts in real time to re-generate new information based on prompts to predict the future of the city.

Working example for chrome on a PC. ( NOTE there are many ways to show the systems)  https://velocity.stanza.co.uk/entangledcities/19/