DOI: 10.1145/3816084 ISSN: 2577-6193
A Walled City: An Interactive AI Artwork for Decentralized Urban Memories and Collective Presence 388
Weidi Zhang, Lijiaozi Cheng, Yi Wang, Jieliang Luo
A Walled City
is an interactive AI art installation that constructs a decentralized virtual city in real time, grounded in the visual memories contributed by its participants. Conceptually inspired by the Kowloon Walled City—a hyper-dense, self-organized urban enclave that once existed in Hong Kong—the project adopts its spatial logic, urban morphology, and visual aesthetics as the foundation for co-creating decentralized virtual settlement with AI. Participants engage by uploading personal images of their visual memories, which are interpreted by a customized multi-agent AI system and transformed into unique architectural chambers. Each chamber acts as both a vessel of artificial memory and a node in a networked, continuously evolving cityscape. This paper presents the conceptual framework, intelligent system design, and experimental visualization of
A Walled City
, revisiting how communities historically formed in decentralized contexts and proposing a novel multi-agent AI system that weaves personal memory fragments into a non-hierarchical shared cyberspace.